Blame him for what?
For “looking forward” on American torture and other war crimes, for the NSA's programs, for the war on whistleblowers, for anything related to these beasts.
Don't get me wrong – I don't think he's completely blameless. Perhaps I ought to say I give Obama no more than 20% of the blame.
We get the remaining 80%.
The other night, I was imagining a whole series of counterfactuals, seeing in my mind's eye Obama as the progressive's wet dream, trying to deliver justice to American war criminals, trying to roll back threats to civil liberties, pardoning Manning and Snowden, taking on Chomsky as a foreign-policy consultant, and so on.
Then I started imagining what we, Obama's dream team, would be doing. You know what I saw? I saw a bunch of fucking Twitter tweets... a round of Facebook likes... diaries and comments and spikes of delight on progressive Web sites... a farcical panoply of utter uselessness.
Where are the street protests, the mass rallies, the general strikes?
Where's the civil disobedience?
Why is it still business-as-usual on our streets?
Is our blood boiling as much as we claim? Or is it boiling only enough to transport our useless, hyper-digitalized American asses from computer to sofa, from “community” Web site to HBO?
In many ways, I still feel suckered by Obama's oratory and vague platitudes. But I no longer feel suckered by “Yes We Can!”
You can't refute that with a ghostly “We.”