President Obama, who campaigned with the heady pledge, “Yes, We Can!” has firmly stated “No, We Can’t” when it comes to using the executive office to correct injustice. A posthumous pardon of boxing’s first black heavyweight champion can’t be done because – as The Los Angeles Times puts it:
[Posthumous pardons] consume precious time and resources from the president and Justice Department that could instead be focused on wading through thousands of clemency requests for people still living.
In spite of their busy schedule of upholding the Bush administration’s abysmal civil liberties policies, Obama’s Justice Department has found time to issue clemency to exactly one living person thing: a Thanksgiving turkey.
When there’s an opportunity for a photo-op that will fill 30 seconds on the evening news, our president is all about Justice and Mercy. Case in point: during the recent Iranian crackdown on protesters, Obama has issued the following condemnation:
The United States joins with the international community in strongly condemning the violent and unjust suppression of innocent Iranian citizens…
Don’t be fooled, Iranian people. Our government is openly hostile to the civil liberties of its own citizens, do you think they give a rat’s ass about your freedom? To make matters worse, a large portion of our citizenry think that nuking your country into the stone age is sound foreign policy.
I’m sorry if that sounds depressing, but it’s true. Governments don’t want to help you. Your clergyman might want to get you into paradise, but if you want to live as a free human being, they’ll do everything they can to keep you out of the voting booth. Supposedly, someone is working on Farsi translations of Thomas Paine’s important works. 200 years in the grave has not stopped Thomas Paine from speaking more truth than any contemporary politician.
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