> He (and Bush before him) assassinated people, assassinates them without trial or due process, while smiling and holding babies and making jokes at the White H

> He (and Bush before him) assassinated people, assassinates them without trial or due process, while smiling and holding babies and making jokes at the White House correspondents dinner, and complaining about the gun culture and mass killings. Reminds me, when I saw him interview with Jon Stewart a few weeks back, I was thinking "look at him, he's trying! such a nice man" (actually he was mainly avoiding making excuses). Then I thought of the character of the Smiler in Transmetropolitan, and remembered. Yesterday, part of a Nine Inch Nails lyric sprang out at me, and I had to think back of that scene: "Don't try to tell me that some power can corrupt a person, you haven't had enough to know what it's like." A lot of powerful people explain away the cognitive dissonance between their promises and their actions with some variation of the above, in different words. And the others, I fear, are just clever enough to not say it out loud. And what are they supposed to do? Have you ever listened to the raving rationalisations of a heroin junkie? If you think that's of a fault in their person instead of a product of their environment, then I suppose you haven't had enough to know what it's like. We should treat addiction and abuse like the health problem it is, not a criminal problem. And we should start with the power elite.