Only off by three years

"We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court," said Romero. "Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today."

Comments

[JR]

Why am I not surprised?

[Duncan]

You know, Romero gets a point for declaring hope finally extinguished by Obama's signing the NDAA. If he meant it. But I don't believe he did. Obama's next assault on civil liberties will probably get the same lament: huruu huruu, hope is now extinguished!

[par4]

Well as Agent Maxwell Smart would say ' He only missed it by that much".

[John Caruso]

Duncan makes a good point (and there's certainly precedent for it).

[Emily Dickinson]

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

[Robert Browning]

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;
Little has yet been changed, I think:
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays through the hinge’s chink.

[T.S. Eliot]

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

[Barry Soetoro]

Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty.
Hope in the face of uncertainty.
The audacity of hope!
In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.
A belief in things not seen.
A belief that there are better days ahead.

[Gomer Pyle]

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

[Jesus Fucking Christ]

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. By their fruits shall ye know them.

[Ebon Krieg]

Hope is diminished daily,
Yet can never be,
Less than zero.

Hope is the wind,
That changes in,
Force and flow.

I hope,
You find hope,
And grow.

[Catherine]

Wow, love the short poetry course.

Is that Obama, Barry?

[John Caruso]

I saw this in the San Francisco Bay Guardian a few years ago (written by one of two Democratic gatekeepers who have a history of berating the actual left in San Francisco):

...I’m starting to feel naïve, as if all my critics were right and that I was foolish to feel hope in the first place. Is this when hope dies?

No, that's what it feels like when false hope dies. Next time choose more carefully where you put it.

[The Creator]

While on the subject of poetry . . .

How fortunate we were
not to have been exposed
to rhetoric

-- it would have falsified
a simple experience;
living grimly,
grimly enduring

Oh there was occasional heroic posturing
mainly from the immature
-- and a dash of demagogic bloodthirstiness

But generally
we were simply prisoners
of a system we had fought
and still opposed.

(Dennis Brutus, "Letters to Martha"