Et tu, Brute!
Those three words immortalize the ultimate in human betrayal.
Shakespeare most poignantly captured the anguish of betrayal Caesar must have felt as he lay bleeding from the stab wounds inflicted on him by his Senate members. As he looked up, gasping for air, his saw his closest friend Brutus with a blood-drenched dagger in his hands. Brutus was among those who stabbed him. "You too, Brutus!" More a statement than a question. From Julius Caesar.
This phrase is a constant reenactment in peoples' lives. Among parents; among siblings; among friends; among lovers; among business partners and workplace colleagues. This is a deplorable human trait. A trait that might as well have echoed from the Oval Office as Obama was betrayed by his American political counterparts from the Republican Party.
Republican Congressman Joe Barton and Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, in effect, stabbed the American people when they betrayed Obama, spilling American blood into the oil-laded waters of the Gulf of Mexico. These characters and their party colleagues and their Tea Party buffoon friends have chosen to play the Nero as Louisiana burns.
British Petroleum has caused the biggest natural disaster in American history, not so much from a technological failure as much as it is from excessive greed that saw cost-cutting, circumventing the conventional wisdom of necessarily incorporating the essential, preventive and precautionary safety measures. A saving that is the fool's measure of being penny wise and pound foolish. The fragile eco-system of the coastline of Louisiana is irreparably damaged. The wildlife of the Louisiana marsh lands is dead and dying. The lives of families that lived for generations from the bounty of the ocean are now facing the imminent and real threat of seeing their livelihoods literally collapse and go up in flames along with the fate of the oil rig that exploded. It is not just Louisiana anymore. The oil slick and the tar-balls are being carried by the underwater currents to the coast of Florida, and eventually, perhaps to reach as far as the continent of Europe.
Obama willed BP into setting up an escrow fund for $20 billion to sustain the lives of the helpless Gulf residents. This is America's ecological 9/11. Unlike the Twin Towers of Manhattan, the collapse of the coastline of Lousiana is not restricted to its immediate vicinity. It may take generations to overcome the ills of what is going on in that region from the still gushing oil well over one mile below the ocean surface. The consequences of the impact on the marine life in these waters is anybody's guess.
Yet, two Republican members of the Congress as mentioned above, and a few Republican apologists in the mold of Ben Steiner, did not bat an eyelid when they challenged the "constitutionality" of Obama's punitive action taken against BP!
I ask you Republican Judases, what "constitutionality" did you go by when you lit the fires of the American Revolution from the ambers of the Boston Tea Party against your Queen across the pond? If the clarion call of "no taxation without representation" sounded like the rising tide of the bold, indefatigable American spirit, what part of the corporate-greed-devouring-ordinary-American-lives with no-Wall-Street-representation is eluding you now? Have you learnt nothing from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of your casinos that passed off as some hallowed financial institutions with greedy thugs at the helms that Main Street, in turn, had to bail out?
Constitutions are made to right what is wrong. It is not delivered on two tablets from some mountain top by a deranged Moses with auditory hallucinations and God-complex contrary to what your obtuse Republican minds can best grasp. Your Creationism mantra yeilds a far superior scan of your atrophied brain than the latest MRI technology can.
You betrayed every single American on Main Street when you chose to become BP's defense attorneys. You betrayed the American people when your Neo-con friends from the previous two terms drained America to its financial ruin in pursuit of your neurotic New World Order wet dreams.
The Americans had just started to scramble onto their two feet from the financial sub-prime blows you wreaked out from under the silken sheets of your foreplay with your corporate masters, when they took another hard one to their heads. BP.
And you say it is "unconstitutional" to hold BP's feet to the fire?
And, you have the gumption to say that Obama did not do enough?
You are griping over Obama's alleged delayed acceptance of the Dutch and Norwegian assistance? Aren't they there now and making no difference whatsoever? Sure, we understand your ploy: the Dutch and the Norwegians would have provided enough distraction to shift the blame 3-ways from BP. This menage a trois is one game of seduction that the Americans won't fall for.
America: who needs bin-Laden when you have Republicans to contend with?
And you can only ask: Et tu, Barton?
There are critics from far left-end of the political spectrum, who blame the Democrats along with Republicans for this mega-disaster. They point to Obama’s original energy plan that had sought to accelerate deep-sea drilling (which is now put on hold). But this is far from being accurate and realistic. We need to consider the "extent" of responsibility attributable to both sides. Some measures of "extent" would be concerning the originators of the deregulation, the motives underlying the deregulation, the overall impact of the deregulation, and so on. The fact is that nearly 35 years of Republican’s deregulation and neutering of government to enforce laws has caused this disaster.
ReplyDeleteSure Simon; all that is true. But my point is that calamities have a way of bringing people together, setting aside all political bickering. Examples are the 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Haiti tragedies. To be unyielding to this auto-trigger of a human response can only speak of a mindset that is sickeningly narcissistic and sociopathic. And when it is reflective of a group of people under a political banner, there is something very, very unsettling about it, almost to be point of being inhuman. These conditions were the very fertile grounds that saw the birth of Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. Both these groups harboured strong ethnocentric biases. So, it is not just the venom, but a lynch-mentality that is pure evil. And, it wears a human face.
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