4 ms·

So one administration came into power with surpluses at hand, cut taxes, increased entitlements, launched a couple of wars, established some rather questionable

by glurgh 13y ago

So one administration came into power with surpluses at hand, cut taxes, increased entitlements, launched a couple of wars, established some rather questionable detention and surveillance programs, damaged relations with a number of allies and on and on. The other one, well, whatever their deficiencies, not most of those things. This is the sort of silliness ('they're all exactly the same!') that, with the help of the Naderites actually helped put a Bush administration in power.

mcantelon 13y ago
Not most of those things, but Bush never went so far as to claiming the power to kill US citizens without a trial. Or establishing something like the "disposition matrix" to decide which citizens should be a candidate for this special treatment.
- glurgh 13y ago
  Didn't need to claim it. US citizens get killed without a trial all the time, as they have been since just about forever, in the course of law enforcement. There's no shortage of perfectly defensible complaints one can have with this or any other administration without having to resort to tinfoil hat ones.
  - mcantelon 13y ago
    What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). That's not "tinfoil hat" (what a banal, overused term), simply acknowledging documented reality. The disposition matrix is being coordinated by John Brennan, one of the Bush administration's torture proponents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before. Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues. But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      He didn't make it any more legal than it was before. As a military matter it's always been legal as long as there's a valid military justification behind it. What Obama has done is to take advantage of the increased ability to remotely use military force to avoid having to send in ground troops or fighter-bombers to accomplish the same goal. It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times. Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.
alan_cx 13y ago
So, essentially Bush did all the hard work paving the way for Obama. From what I can see, Obama has not given Americans back one single freedom that Bush removed, in fact he has expanded and built on them. Or, just imagine if that Bush monkey had been able to do the Hollywood USA, USA, USA murder of Bin Laden, sitting there sniggering (Insert Jon Stewart impression) like a nut job while the operation was executed, like Obama petty much did. (Lets be honest, Obama could hardly contain himself.) The left and rest of the planet would have gone mental. Don't get me wrong, I do exaggerate to show the point, but we in the UK experienced something like this and you could see it coming a mile off. When Blair (remember the British gimp Bush had in tow?) came to power it was after Thatcher and the limp replacement, John Major (forgotten him? Most have). People were over the moon and expected much. With in 3 days it was pretty clear that we had just replaced one terrible regime with one while was moulded in its image, and just build on the questionable things the previous government did, and reversed nothing what so ever. This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics and I saw the exact same tragedy unfold with Obama. Its a real shame, and damning indictment of western politics. Frankly the whole thing is a sad tragedy.
- glurgh 13y ago
  This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive. And my point is, very specifically, not that 'if you have misgivings about one side or administration, you ought to have none about another'. It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone? - it's a decidedly unfalsifiable position to begin with.
  - aethertap 13y ago
    There are certainly clear differences between parties, otherwise people wouldn't be fighting each other over who gets elected. I like to think of it via a mental picture though - the American political system is like a line: on one end, you have the republicans, and on the other you have the democrats. Moderates and independents generally fall somewhere on the line between the two extremes. The issue is that the line they all lie upon is actually just a one-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional space (like a plane, to make it simple). My political beliefs lie on that plane, basically equidistant from both of the potential parties. It is therefore basically impossible to get meaningfully closer to what I would like to see by supporting either party, so in that sense "there is no difference between them." I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).

by glurgh 13y ago

mcantelon 13y ago

Not most of those things, but Bush never went so far as to claiming the power to kill US citizens without a trial. Or establishing something like the "disposition matrix" to decide which citizens should be a candidate for this special treatment.

glurgh 13y ago
Didn't need to claim it. US citizens get killed without a trial all the time, as they have been since just about forever, in the course of law enforcement. There's no shortage of perfectly defensible complaints one can have with this or any other administration without having to resort to tinfoil hat ones.
- mcantelon 13y ago
  What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). That's not "tinfoil hat" (what a banal, overused term), simply acknowledging documented reality. The disposition matrix is being coordinated by John Brennan, one of the Bush administration's torture proponents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before. Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues. But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    He didn't make it any more legal than it was before. As a military matter it's always been legal as long as there's a valid military justification behind it. What Obama has done is to take advantage of the increased ability to remotely use military force to avoid having to send in ground troops or fighter-bombers to accomplish the same goal. It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times. Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.

alan_cx 13y ago

So, essentially Bush did all the hard work paving the way for Obama. From what I can see, Obama has not given Americans back one single freedom that Bush removed, in fact he has expanded and built on them. Or, just imagine if that Bush monkey had been able to do the Hollywood USA, USA, USA murder of Bin Laden, sitting there sniggering (Insert Jon Stewart impression) like a nut job while the operation was executed, like Obama petty much did. (Lets be honest, Obama could hardly contain himself.) The left and rest of the planet would have gone mental. Don't get me wrong, I do exaggerate to show the point, but we in the UK experienced something like this and you could see it coming a mile off. When Blair (remember the British gimp Bush had in tow?) came to power it was after Thatcher and the limp replacement, John Major (forgotten him? Most have). People were over the moon and expected much. With in 3 days it was pretty clear that we had just replaced one terrible regime with one while was moulded in its image, and just build on the questionable things the previous government did, and reversed nothing what so ever. This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics and I saw the exact same tragedy unfold with Obama. Its a real shame, and damning indictment of western politics. Frankly the whole thing is a sad tragedy.

glurgh 13y ago
This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive. And my point is, very specifically, not that 'if you have misgivings about one side or administration, you ought to have none about another'. It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone? - it's a decidedly unfalsifiable position to begin with.
- aethertap 13y ago
  There are certainly clear differences between parties, otherwise people wouldn't be fighting each other over who gets elected. I like to think of it via a mental picture though - the American political system is like a line: on one end, you have the republicans, and on the other you have the democrats. Moderates and independents generally fall somewhere on the line between the two extremes. The issue is that the line they all lie upon is actually just a one-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional space (like a plane, to make it simple). My political beliefs lie on that plane, basically equidistant from both of the potential parties. It is therefore basically impossible to get meaningfully closer to what I would like to see by supporting either party, so in that sense "there is no difference between them." I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).