Fuck Wall St.

I say, let the motherfucker crash....

The refreshing sound of the English language

President Obama held his first press conference on Monday. It was the first presidential press conference in nearly a decade that didn’t feature slouching, sneering, and leaving me with a vague feeling that I was a 3 year old who’d just listened to a drunken father explain why mommy is such a tramp, and then forcing me to give gramps a sponge bath.

It was a pithy conference as well, with big properly used and annunciated words that seemed extemporaneous and not written back at the home office of the National Committee. Or in the bunker of an undisclosed location.

The part that really brought me out of my chair though, was when Ed Henry of CNN asked the president about his plans for Afghanistan.

Henry asked the usual questions about escalation and eventual withdrawal, but then amazed me by asking the very question I’ve been waiting to hear but never dreamed that someone would ask.

“There's a Pentagon policy that bans media coverage of the flag-draped coffins from coming in to Dover Air Force Base,” Henry began. “In 2004, then-Senator Joe Biden said that it was shameful for dead soldiers to be, quote, ‘snuck back into the country under the cover of night.’

“You've promised unprecedented transparency, openness in your government,” he continued. “Will you overturn that policy so the American people can see the full human cost of war?”

When I heard that, I jumped up off of the couch and began to pound on the table. Finally, someone was asking the president to pull back the veil of obscurity and propaganda and let Americans begin to see the true costs of the wars in the Middle East.

The policy against showing coffins returning was designed to cover a big Neo-con mistake made during the Vietnam War, and for months I’ve hoped that the first thing Obama would do on the war front would be to start showing coffins.

From there, maybe we could progress to actually attaching war costs to a real budget, and in my little dream world it could be the first step in losing the costly Bush-era “war on terr’” meme.

Public opinion of Vietnam, turned on the nightly news, when Americans were able to witness the carnage we inflicted on the peasants of that country and our (mostly) boys in uniform.

Back then we had real news reporters such as David Halberstam, who were not “embedded,” and dragged through the mud with the troops. News anchors back then weren’t beholden to the corporations that co-owned the medium and the weapons manufacturers, or stockholders who demand 18 to 23 percent return on investments.

In some corners, Afghanistan is being called “Obama’s Vietnam,” and there are thousands of pages in print and on the Internets (I do miss some things about W.) devoted to explaining why that region of the world is where empire goes to die.

Unfortunately, Obama equivocated and did a fairly cleaver soft shoe around the issue, putting out the usual platitudes about how “thoughts and prayers go out to the families.”

He did it without the cheesy arrogance of his predecessor though, so I guess he gets some credit on that front.

“People have asked me, when did it hit you that you are now president?” he said. “And what I told them was the most sobering moment is signing letters to the families of our fallen heroes. It reminds you of the responsibilities that you carry in this office and — and the consequences of the decisions that you make.”

Wow. A president talking about consequences of his decisions. I could almost forget that in the next part of his answer, and in a subsequent answer to Helen Thomas, he picked up right where the Bush regime left off.

There was the usual blather about how we’ve brought “democracy” to the region and the 9/11, “terr’ist” talking points, as well as Soviet-style references to “der Homeland.”

The majority of his news conference though, was devoted to the very real threat of an imminent economic meltdown, which is a far more real threat than some shadowy gang of oil-rich heathens waiting in the shadows to attack our way of life.

And the truly sad, and dare I say, ironic part of the whole thing is that we are chasing shadowy threats to our own doom with the very funding that could save our economy.

Obama has been accused of cutting “defense” spending, when he’s actually raising it by about $14 billion, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still off the books. The 2010 “defense” budget weighs in at a whopping $527 billion. Most of that will go to useless Cold War-era technology, designed to fight our previous ideological enemy.

Just imagine what even a fraction of that spending could do get our economy running again.