Obama and Louis XI

Dear Mr. President,

“Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare.” He who does not know how to deceive does not know how to rule. (Louis XI, King of France, 1461-1483). His bio could be yours, Mr. President. Wily, perfidious and cruel, he never fought his enemy openly if he could win in any other way. Two peas in a pod. Secret “Kill Lists,” secret justifications for extra-judicial assassinations and covert wars, secret deals with Middle East tyrants… the list goes on and on. Another characteristic of Louis XI: he ruled “not like a medieval tyrant but with the cool-headed tyranny of a lawyer.” That’s you, Mr. President. Slick. Secretive. A trickster. Lawerly weasel words that permit continued indefinite detention without trial or judicial oversight, extraordinary rendition to torture, and military tribunals of “enemy combatants.” You ignore international and domestic law, treaties and human rights. You order assassinations without remorse. You morphed the CIA into your own private paramilitary that wages covert wars around the globe. You gutted the Constitution by signing into law the NDAA and extending and expanding the Patriot Act. Typically, you signed both when people weren’t watching, the first on New Year’s Eve, the second a few minutes before midnight. That’s how you operate, in the dead of night and in secret. That’s when you send your teams of assassins to terrorize and kill people in distant lands who are no threat and have no defense – in the dead of night. You’ve put in place all the pieces necessary for a full-fledged police state and you are beginning to use it by bringing the full force of the U.S. (in)justice system to bear on whistleblowers, journalists and dissenters. You have cowed the mainstream media, snuffed the Occupy movement and terrorized anyone who dares blow the whistle on government abuse and corruption. All this with the smiles and reassuring words of the trickster, the con. You are the enemy of democracy and justice, Mr. President, a clear and present danger. You are not the lesser of two evils, the refrain I hear constantly. You are, as Glen Ford has eloquently called you, The More Effective of Two Evils. You have mesmerized us and lulled us into quiescence. A quote from the CIA manual on deception written in the 1940s by a magician named Mulholland: “The hand is not quicker than the eye. The key to an illusion is to make the audience explain away the fact it has been deceived in plain sight.” You and Louis XI, masters of deceit.