Nobody can deny that President Barack Obama has a good sense of humour. His speeches at White House Correspondence Dinners are the stuff of legends, with perfectly timed quips and the dead-pan humour most stand up comedians would envy. Plus, who doesn’t want to see the likes of Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump be rubbished on stage?
This year’s correspondence dinner was no exception. In fact, the Guardian even ran an article asking whether Obama was the ‘funniest politician ever’. His sense of humour may have won him fans all over the world, and probably helped him win a second term, but I couldn’t help but be a bit creeped out by it.
Not because of the jokes themselves, but rather that laughing and applauding a President who has signed off on an unprecedented level of unmanned drone attacks, admitted to having a personal ‘kill list’ and whose administration has actively attacked whistle blowers seems a little insincere. Indeed, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has noted, Obama has launched over 300 drone strikes in Pakistan and 66 and counting in Yemen. Beyond the scope of ‘Al-Qaeda Militants’, the strikes have killed thousands of civilians, including harmless women and children. As Glenn Greenwald has noted, many of these drone strikes are, despite the prominent argument, indiscriminate.
In fact, the administration has frequently played around with definitions of what might classify as a militant; generally, a twenty-something male, living in remote mountainous regions where they are likely to be in some form of contact with suspected Al-Qaeda operatives. Beyond the looseness of this definition, its also ineffective; it fosters hatred, not just in the Middle East, but in the West too.
While the Nobel-Prize winning Obama was charming a crowd of hacks, policy wonks and public figures, Guantanamo Bay still remains open. Though the President has recently talked about shutting the centre down, we’ve heard it before with little action. Nor has he condemned continued methods of torture and abuse still actively used by the US military in the prison today.
You might think I’m being a bit unfair to the President. After all, surely with a hostile, Republican dominated congress, we can’t expect him to be the messiah he was more than willing to be characterised by in 2008. Besides, he’s an elected official, and to think he’ll be honest is a pipe dream.
But what about in areas where the President still retains the greatest amount of authority? For example, when Obama signed the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA), allowing for an indefinite detention of suspected terrorists. That isn’t the first time the administration showed total contempt for the law, notably denying the Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his ‘Miranda Rights’, or even his repeated requests for legal counsel.
And what about transparency? Well, we still have that rather murky case involving Bradley Manning, the US military officer whose information became a phenomenon across the world through Wikileaks. Mannings prize for that was a tour of US high security prisons. I’m sure Joe McCarthy would be very proud.
Bring any of this up, and you’ll likely either be dismissed as a ‘hater’, or told to ignore the bad stuff because the President is telling a few jokes. Over a million people have watched the clip on YouTube, with many comments telling people to appreciate a president that can ‘relate to the people’. In fact, this probably is the best indicator of how cynical our politics has become; where we praise style over substance, and charisma over integrity. After all, would we dismiss the war crimes, dilution of civil liberties and total disregard for the law if Bashar-Al-Assad brought home the banter once a year?
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