The Moral High Ground: I do NOT like criticizing a leader whom I enthusiastically supported and loved. Would a Republican be any better? HELL NO. It is why I oftentimes hold back critique. There are some writings of especially civil libertarian advocate Glenn Greenwald which deserve to be read and thought about thoroughly. This is one of them. It is entitled: "Manning, Obama and U.S. moral leadership" link below.

I will never support a Republican for president or any other office but that does not mean I must stay silent when I deem there is an egregious overstepping of our civil libertarian Constitutional principles by a president who taught that course and, indeed, by the law student Obama, who studied at Harvard under the great civil libertarian Professor Lawrence Tribe.

I continue to excuse some presidential actions I deem atrocious because I believe the president to be constrained by a reactionary right-wing in extremis Republican Tea Bag Party House of Representatives. That party is threatening to take control of the Senate as well. Obama NEEDS to be in the presidency in 2012 to check that utterly destructive force which could end this nation as we know it catapulting it back into the nineteenth century.

The president is not a dictator and his power is limited by the necessity of a checks and balances system of government mandating compromise which our Founders presciently installed. Still, there are many things he could have done and can still do to ameliorate the Bush administration's pulverizing of the basic tenets of our nation. The moral high ground the president held often gives way to the low ground of unprincipled policy obviating the hope and change that we so ardently believed his presidency would bestow.

I would LOVE to know what REALLY is in the president's mind to make him take such an egregious right hand turn on many issues and show a paucity of the leadership he promised during his campaign. It is an enigma that will continue to plague me, I am sure, for many years to come.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/11/manning

A Very Golden Rule: The nation "celebrated" the 150th anniversary of the Civil War which began at Fort Sumter April 12, 1861. I would rather forget that war except as a student of history. If we must remember it commemoratively I hope it teaches us the forces that would bring us back to that evil period of the so called “southern cause” and who cloak their rhetoric in “states rights” philosophical and political thought must be restrained from walking the halls of power. There are those, mostly but not entirely, in the south who to this day advocate not only for "states rights" but, as unthinkable as it might be, even for secession from the union. As much as our nation seemingly is often stuck in putrefying racist animus no one, I think, can deny since that brutal Civil War period we have advanced the cause of racial justice.

We must not return in reactionary fashion to those destructive times but must advocate for egalitarian policies and truly do to others what you would want done unto you!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42548201/ns/us_news-life/