Hi Owen. I read and enjoyed your original article. However, I think the point Pilger has made (or tried to make) is very different to how you understand it.

Your piece may ultimately critique and criticise Obama, particularly around failure to address gross inequality and on foreign policy and military failures. But it’s the promotion of Obama’s coolness factor that has helped him to get away with these failures and avoid criticism. I think this is really what Pilger was pointing out.

You specifically said in your article that Obama is “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician.” You didn’t explain in your piece that this sentence was paraphrasing what many people think about him, so it was only fair to assume that this is what you actually think/thought.

And here is how I understand Pilger sees things: drone killings, failure to close Guantanamo, failure to defend Palestine and denounce Israel, ongoing weapon sales, ludicrous relationship with Saudi, failure in Libya, failure to address the gross levels of inequality in US means Obama should not ever be considered ‘cool’.

Whether we like it or not, the coolness argument is often used as a defence a la, “Well, the US is killing people with drones, without trial, with limited information to the public about the threat that those being killed actually pose to the US and conceals information as to whether these killings may actual serve to put the US and its allies at more risk… but Obama is really charismatic and cool so maybe we should just focus on his hilarious appearance on Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee/Jimmy Fallon/[insert name of show here] instead.”

It’s an important theme that Pilger regularly addresses in his work and it’s worth seriously considering journalists’ roles in perpetuating this coolness factor when it is so readily used as part of a PR and advertising campaign to sell a product or candidate that we think makes us feel good but actually harms us (Pilger uses an old cigarette analogy in this speech), and how pushing the coolness factor might be removing Obama from more robust and fairer (meaning, in this context, harsher) judgement, possibly including in your own journalism.

I hope that this doesn’t come across as anything but comradely. I have great respect and admiration for your work.