PrintMay 6, 2011
Obama's Birth Certificate and Osama's Death Picture
These two have an interesting common denominator that reveals much about our president's mindset.
Consider CIA director Leon Panetta's reaction of shrug-of-the-shoulders "sure" when asked whether the photos would be revealed. After all, the killing of Osama is big news, the public is curious, so why not? Some won't look, some will look with horror, some with disgust, some with revulsion, some with gloating, some will make a screensaver of it - a normal and totally understandable gamut of reactions to a highly visible event.
Obama's reaction could not have been more different to Panetta's. "What will the enemies think of it?" is the first question on his mind. Will it, to use the Soviet expression justifying suppression of the negative internal news, "pour water on the mill of the enemies?"
And this is not the first expression of that attitude. Obama's refusal to disclose his birth certificate to the curious public falls into the same pattern and shows the same feature of his mindset -- an innate, instinctive desire to hide information from the public rather than to reveal it.
This desire comes either out of a deeply insecure, suspicions frame of mind, or indicates some highly crafty and calculating mindset, or is simply a symptom of paranoia. After all, when Donald Trump forced the president to reveal his birth certificate, weren't we all asking ourselves "so what was there to hide? Why the whole hush-hush business?"
The same is the case of Osama's pictures. Sure they've got to be gruesome - but wouldn't the potential spectator expert that upfront, knowing full well from the movies how that kind of wound looks like?
What this episode tells us more than anything else, is that our president has more than a touch of the Soviet-style paranoia -- and, given that, it is not surprising that he is so out of touch with American public's feelings and American public's mindset.
