An open letter of apology to President Obama

Dear DEAR President Obama,

Now that you have signed the National Defense Appropriation Act into law giving yourself the power to arrest and imprison any American indefinitely, I want to tell you how very very very very very sorry I am for all those nasty things I wrote about you. Name-calling is never appropriate and I should have known better, especially when I compared you to Benito (“Three cheers for war!”) Mussolini for making undeclared wars in Africa. In retrospect, I was way off base. Since the NDAA nullifies the Constitution, you might agree with Mussolini’s viewpoint, “Mankind is tired of liberty” but that’s definitely where the comparison stops. Mussolini was a fat slob whereas everyone can see you are the leanest, trimmest, handsomest president we’ve had in the White House since JFK, maybe handsomer.

Likewise, I’m exceedingly sorry I wrote U.S. forces in Afghanistan are killing innocent people every day. I know that is not their intent. As Hermann Goring once said, “I am in the habit of shooting from time to time and if I sometimes make mistakes, at least I have shot.” Since comparing your actions to a top Nazi is odious, let’s just say as the noted American gangster Mickey Cohen once boasted, “I never killed a man that didn’t deserve it.” Sure, it’s technically an “assassination” to execute people without a trial but your suspects were fingered by the CIA. We need to keep in mind you’re striving to reduce terrorism, not necessarily uphold the law for, to quote J. Edgar Hoover, “Justice is incidental to law and order.”

If the CIA had the smarts to grab you right out of college and give you a job, I’d be surprised they could be so mistaken as to order the execution of innocent people. The late President Nixon may have said of them, “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?” but what did he know? Actually, you can now take comfort from Nixon’s words, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Anyway, while I’m apologizing to you, please tell the CIA I take back all those nasty things I wrote, saying they’re the world’s biggest criminal syndicate ever, and comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan for operating in secret, kidnapping and lynching. We all know the CIA’s critics do tend to exaggerate. Some say the Agency’s overthrown 30 countries by force and violence when it’s probably been just 26 or so. As ex-CIA Director William Colby once said, “I have definitional problems with the word ‘violence.’ I don’t know what the word ‘violence’ means.” At times, the Agency may have run amok here and there but at least it showed its smarts by not copying the KKK’s cross burnings, which definitely would have made us look bad in Muslim countries.

So I’m glad you refused to prosecute CIA torturers. Incidentally, when the Agency destroyed its torture flicks, it didn’t prove obstruction of justice so much as not wanting to make Hollywood producers look like action movie amateurs. Imagine a scene in which a CIA agent says of a waterboard victim, “He sleeps with the fishes” and it’s for real, not fictional like in “The Godfather.” When you leave the White House, you might consider Hollywood. You’d grasp the true meaning of Samuel Goldwyn’s words, “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” because without a Constitution now everything’s gonna be verbal.

I also apologize for describing you as the moral opposite of Rev. Martin Luther King, because he was anti-war while you have been making wars at the drop of a bomb. Whose to say MLK would criticize your wars in Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Yemen, right? And that’s just a half dozen countries out of 200, so what’s the big deal? You’re only trying to be friendly as you expand the number of U.S. military bases abroad. We’ve only got 900. As JFK’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk, once said, “While we are sleeping, two-thirds of the world are plotting to do us in.” Or as Billy the Kid warned: “I see many enemies around and mighty few friends.”

As for my disparaging you for assuming “king of the world” powers of life-and-death over all human beings on the planet, well, while that’s technically true, I know you are not the sort of guy to actually exercise those powers, even if misguided liberals do mock you as “President O’Bomber.” The NBA is always advertising the good its players do in their communities and you’re a basketball player yourself, right? I mean, indiscriminate killing is not something an NBA player would do, is it? So, logically, you wouldn’t do it, either. Actually, I think that if you had the desire to play basketball professionally you obviously would have been a top star like Dwayne Wade or Kobe Bryant. Am I right, bro’? You don’t mind if I call you bro’, do you?

In closing, I think you can take satisfaction knowing that you outperformed the Nixon regime, whose Henry Kissinger once said, “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little bit longer.” The fact is, after only three years in office you have inspired 300 million Americans to be on their very very best behavior, or else, no mean achievement. Yours Truly, your friend, loyal supporter, Cheerleader-in-Chief, and soon-to-be-campaign contributor, Sherwood Ross P.S. May you have four more years! (And me, too.)

Sherwood Ross is a public relations consultant whose clients have just left him He’s indebted to Robert Singer’s “The Bad Guys’ Quote Book” from Avon Press, from which he lifted many of the quotes for this article.

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