8 ms·

Please don't make this about one party or one president. It's not. This kind of behavior goes way, way beyond partisan politics, and to reduce it to that is to

by rosser 13y ago

Please don't make this about one party or one president. It's not. This kind of behavior goes way, way beyond partisan politics, and to reduce it to that is to abdicate pretty much all of your agency or ability to do anything about it, not least because partisan politics is more about apportioning blame for problems than it is finding solutions to them. Getting all, "Thanks, Obama!" over what the NSA was up to long before he was elected — if not before Bush was elected — is giving the people who actually did this, and are still doing it, a complete pass.

ck2 13y ago
The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong". He also has the power to bring to light any bill that is put on his desk for signature. Obama grew everything Bush did. The TSA, the NSA, all have become far bigger and more "powerful" under Obama. I'm not an idiot, I know congress is as much at fault. He is at fault for not fighting it - it's his job as president of this country.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  That's not the point. While we should hold everyone involved - even peripherally - responsible, it's not appropriate or productive to compare Obama to Bush. We need to frame the objection as, "This is wrong!" not, "This is worse than/just like $OTHER_PERSON." It's implicitly partisan.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    It's perfectly appropriate to compare them, as there is no longer anything left to contrast between the two.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Appropriate? Maybe. Productive? Not really.
      - unclebucknasty 13y ago
        If, no matter who we "elect", we get the same policies, then I do think it's productive to highlight this via comparing and contrasting the parties/representatives. This shows very strong common threads running through two parties which are presented to us as drastically different. That, in turn, exposes the fact that there is another "power" that completely supercedes our democratic process and the very notion that we actually have a representative form of government. Now, what we do with that information is another story. Talk raises awareness, but it's not enough to just talk about it. There needs to be a viable third party and protests aimed solely and specifically at reform such as removing the money from politics, term limits, closing the revolving door between industry and government, etc.
- adventured 13y ago
  Not to mention the President has substantial executive order powers, that are often very hard to overrule. If the President went to bat for privacy, openly and regularly explained to the US public why, and used his executive order powers to implement changes - well, let the Congress try to overrule that. Obama can then issue 500 executive orders the next morning, slicing the issue into countless separate pieces, let Congress choke on trying to overrule it all, and if they want to stop him at that point, then they can impeach him - and at least Obama would stand on principle, and he'd be the only President impeached for doing the right thing. Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Congress can very easily overrule that, by the simple expedient of defunding anything it doesn't approve of. Two current examples: http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303869-house-votes-to-defund-obamas-administrative-amnesty-for-immigrants http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303869-house-vot... http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-votes-to-delay-bulk-ammo-purchase-by-dhs http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-vot... I too would sort of prefer that the President function as a benign dictator but Congress can exert much more fine-grained control over the Executive than the Executive can over legislative excess - Clinton actually got Congress to give him a line-item veto but the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional only 2 years later.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    I agree that he probably doesn't want to. That Obama is somehow progressive was a fantasy people clung to because of the trauma of Bush, but Obama didn't even campaign on a progressive platform - at best he fit in the centre, but on many things he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least (by European standards he's still far right, as pretty much every US president, - many of his policies would be hard to defend even for most European conservative parties) He just looked like a progressive choice against the backdrop of Bush and Cheney and McCain tied to the horror of possibly having Palin represent the lunatic fringe. BUT, even if he did want to, if he tried to stand firm, everything else would grind to a halt. He'd burn all political capital he's got.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition? The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong". 'Obama holds America hostage.' I typed the above as a tongue-in-cheek response to your argument, but then I did a search on it out of curiosity and got >35k results. I sympathize with your point, but as of last summer about 1 in 6 Americans still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Historically, Presidents back into issues rather than planting their feet on them, because political capital is not unlimited. http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-Discomfort-with-Romney%E2%80%99s-Mormon-Religion.aspx http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-... Last time Obama reauthorized the Patriot act (passed by a veto-proof supermajority, incidentally - 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House), Republicans complained about the fact that he used an autopen to sign it remotely: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06/republican-protest-obama-bill-signing-with-autopen-/1#.UIqv4Gl25SY http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06... I don't mean it as a personal attack, but I think your expectations are a little unrealistic.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    >Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition? I like how you said "opposition" rather than "public opposition" because it's what makes the statement true. Fox News will spend all day and all night discussing how Obama is probably a Muslim from Kenya and then "let you draw your own conclusions" regardless of what Obama actually does. That's going to happen whether he does the right thing or not, so why should it stop him from doing the right thing? I'm really not sure what you're even trying to argue here. It sounds a lot like an argument that because someone somewhere can be found loudly disagreeing with us that we ought to give up. People disagreeing with you is part of democracy. You fight for what you think is right in the court of public opinion and at some point we have an election -- and if the people we elect don't do what we want we get to try it again in the next round, and threaten them with the boot in the meantime. That's what we're doing right now. We're expressing our grievances in public and kicking up our own shitstorm so that more like-minded people will express their views to elected officials and otherwise try to make change.
philwelch 13y ago
Obama was elected on a promise to stop this bullshit. That promise was a lie. For all his faults, George W. Bush never campaigned as a civil libertarian.
- rosser 13y ago
  Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state? Or does it just make him a liar? Look, my point is this: as long as we waste our time bickering over whose fucking fault this mess is, no-one is doing a damned thing to fix it. I'd rather people spend their time and energy on the latter. If you think finger-pointing is a better use of yours, more power to you, and have fun with that.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    > Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state? Actually, yes. Because back when people were angry enough about the issue, they focused all that anger on Bush. Then comes Obama and all that energy gets transformed into support for him because people honestly believed that he was different, that he was against ever-expanding warfare abroad and ever-shrinking civil liberties at home. And when he won in 2008, the people of this country, who were outraged at everything Bush had done, got their satisfaction. There was vast public sentiment against this kind of thing. Obama subverted it and destroyed it.
    - Vivtek 13y ago
      He was actually given the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush - 100% subversion. I think it's not unfair to say that he's harmed American democracy more than Bush could have, by legitimizing every harmful thing Bush did.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - malandrew 13y ago
        Can the committee giving out that prize revoke it? And if so, have they ever done so in the past and under what pretenses?
nikcub 13y ago
A campaign promise Obama made was to revisit the PATRIOT Act and when it came up for renewal to implement better oversight for NSL's and sneak-and-peak warrants. The Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2009 without a single modification, despite there being a bi-partizan bill on the floor of congress that looked to implement many more checks and balances, as Obama wanted. Here is what candidate Obama said in opposition to the FISA extension bill in 2008: > "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty." Guess what he did when he became President .. He also said he would kill warrantless surveillance, but by extending the FISA Act. they changed the warrantless period from 48 hours to a week, at the same time banning states from requesting information and plugging a lot of other loopholes that legal challenges to FISA and warrantless wiretaps could have used in courts. Obama did a complete 180 on civil liberties (there were other issues as well - Gitmo, habeas corpus for enemy combatants, the coke/crack sentencing disparity, assassinating US citizens with drones etc.) and for some reason seems to enjoy the tough on crime/tough on terrorism stance.
- mistermann 13y ago
  I will continue to say: the President has no power. He is a figurehead to placate the citizenry, he takes his marching orders from higher powers (I don't claim to know who that might be). Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but look at the reality.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant. On a personal basis, Obama is clearly taking part in all this and is an accomplice.
    - rosser 13y ago
      Great, so he's an accomplice. I don't think very many people actually dispute that. I certainly don't. So fucking what? What does identifying him as an accomplice to the surveillance actually do? Does it make the surveillance somehow magically stop? Does it delete all the data the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other TLAs have about you from their databases? Or does it just serve to stoke your righteous indignation over getting fooled by yet another politician? When can we stop bickering over whose goddamned fault it is and start, you know, fixing it?
pessimizer 13y ago
I don't know what this comment is replying to. The parent seemed to blame Bush, Obama, and hypothetical future administrations. The desperation to completely absolve Obama based on claims of his office's powerlessness, Congress, or Bush is bizarre. It's also Greenwald's primary political critique, (not) coincidentally. Obama has been involved with this from the first day of his presidency until today, it's in his branch, he fought for immunity for telcos and reauthorized PATRIOT. If he had absolutely no ability to effect it, we should just stop having elections.

by rosser 13y ago

ck2 13y ago

The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong". He also has the power to bring to light any bill that is put on his desk for signature. Obama grew everything Bush did. The TSA, the NSA, all have become far bigger and more "powerful" under Obama. I'm not an idiot, I know congress is as much at fault. He is at fault for not fighting it - it's his job as president of this country.

dylangs1030 13y ago
That's not the point. While we should hold everyone involved - even peripherally - responsible, it's not appropriate or productive to compare Obama to Bush. We need to frame the objection as, "This is wrong!" not, "This is worse than/just like $OTHER_PERSON." It's implicitly partisan.
- philwelch 13y ago
  It's perfectly appropriate to compare them, as there is no longer anything left to contrast between the two.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Appropriate? Maybe. Productive? Not really.
    - unclebucknasty 13y ago
      If, no matter who we "elect", we get the same policies, then I do think it's productive to highlight this via comparing and contrasting the parties/representatives. This shows very strong common threads running through two parties which are presented to us as drastically different. That, in turn, exposes the fact that there is another "power" that completely supercedes our democratic process and the very notion that we actually have a representative form of government. Now, what we do with that information is another story. Talk raises awareness, but it's not enough to just talk about it. There needs to be a viable third party and protests aimed solely and specifically at reform such as removing the money from politics, term limits, closing the revolving door between industry and government, etc.
adventured 13y ago
Not to mention the President has substantial executive order powers, that are often very hard to overrule. If the President went to bat for privacy, openly and regularly explained to the US public why, and used his executive order powers to implement changes - well, let the Congress try to overrule that. Obama can then issue 500 executive orders the next morning, slicing the issue into countless separate pieces, let Congress choke on trying to overrule it all, and if they want to stop him at that point, then they can impeach him - and at least Obama would stand on principle, and he'd be the only President impeached for doing the right thing. Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Congress can very easily overrule that, by the simple expedient of defunding anything it doesn't approve of. Two current examples: http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303869-house-votes-to-defund-obamas-administrative-amnesty-for-immigrants http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303869-house-vot... http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-votes-to-delay-bulk-ammo-purchase-by-dhs http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-vot... I too would sort of prefer that the President function as a benign dictator but Congress can exert much more fine-grained control over the Executive than the Executive can over legislative excess - Clinton actually got Congress to give him a line-item veto but the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional only 2 years later.
- vidarh 13y ago
  I agree that he probably doesn't want to. That Obama is somehow progressive was a fantasy people clung to because of the trauma of Bush, but Obama didn't even campaign on a progressive platform - at best he fit in the centre, but on many things he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least (by European standards he's still far right, as pretty much every US president, - many of his policies would be hard to defend even for most European conservative parties) He just looked like a progressive choice against the backdrop of Bush and Cheney and McCain tied to the horror of possibly having Palin represent the lunatic fringe. BUT, even if he did want to, if he tried to stand firm, everything else would grind to a halt. He'd burn all political capital he's got.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition? The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong". 'Obama holds America hostage.' I typed the above as a tongue-in-cheek response to your argument, but then I did a search on it out of curiosity and got >35k results. I sympathize with your point, but as of last summer about 1 in 6 Americans still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Historically, Presidents back into issues rather than planting their feet on them, because political capital is not unlimited. http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-Discomfort-with-Romney%E2%80%99s-Mormon-Religion.aspx http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-... Last time Obama reauthorized the Patriot act (passed by a veto-proof supermajority, incidentally - 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House), Republicans complained about the fact that he used an autopen to sign it remotely: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06/republican-protest-obama-bill-signing-with-autopen-/1#.UIqv4Gl25SY http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06... I don't mean it as a personal attack, but I think your expectations are a little unrealistic.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition? I like how you said "opposition" rather than "public opposition" because it's what makes the statement true. Fox News will spend all day and all night discussing how Obama is probably a Muslim from Kenya and then "let you draw your own conclusions" regardless of what Obama actually does. That's going to happen whether he does the right thing or not, so why should it stop him from doing the right thing? I'm really not sure what you're even trying to argue here. It sounds a lot like an argument that because someone somewhere can be found loudly disagreeing with us that we ought to give up. People disagreeing with you is part of democracy. You fight for what you think is right in the court of public opinion and at some point we have an election -- and if the people we elect don't do what we want we get to try it again in the next round, and threaten them with the boot in the meantime. That's what we're doing right now. We're expressing our grievances in public and kicking up our own shitstorm so that more like-minded people will express their views to elected officials and otherwise try to make change.

philwelch 13y ago

Obama was elected on a promise to stop this bullshit. That promise was a lie. For all his faults, George W. Bush never campaigned as a civil libertarian.

rosser 13y ago
Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state? Or does it just make him a liar? Look, my point is this: as long as we waste our time bickering over whose fucking fault this mess is, no-one is doing a damned thing to fix it. I'd rather people spend their time and energy on the latter. If you think finger-pointing is a better use of yours, more power to you, and have fun with that.
- philwelch 13y ago
  > Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state? Actually, yes. Because back when people were angry enough about the issue, they focused all that anger on Bush. Then comes Obama and all that energy gets transformed into support for him because people honestly believed that he was different, that he was against ever-expanding warfare abroad and ever-shrinking civil liberties at home. And when he won in 2008, the people of this country, who were outraged at everything Bush had done, got their satisfaction. There was vast public sentiment against this kind of thing. Obama subverted it and destroyed it.
  - Vivtek 13y ago
    He was actually given the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush - 100% subversion. I think it's not unfair to say that he's harmed American democracy more than Bush could have, by legitimizing every harmful thing Bush did.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - malandrew 13y ago
      Can the committee giving out that prize revoke it? And if so, have they ever done so in the past and under what pretenses?

nikcub 13y ago

A campaign promise Obama made was to revisit the PATRIOT Act and when it came up for renewal to implement better oversight for NSL's and sneak-and-peak warrants. The Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2009 without a single modification, despite there being a bi-partizan bill on the floor of congress that looked to implement many more checks and balances, as Obama wanted. Here is what candidate Obama said in opposition to the FISA extension bill in 2008: > "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty." Guess what he did when he became President .. He also said he would kill warrantless surveillance, but by extending the FISA Act. they changed the warrantless period from 48 hours to a week, at the same time banning states from requesting information and plugging a lot of other loopholes that legal challenges to FISA and warrantless wiretaps could have used in courts. Obama did a complete 180 on civil liberties (there were other issues as well - Gitmo, habeas corpus for enemy combatants, the coke/crack sentencing disparity, assassinating US citizens with drones etc.) and for some reason seems to enjoy the tough on crime/tough on terrorism stance.

mistermann 13y ago
I will continue to say: the President has no power. He is a figurehead to placate the citizenry, he takes his marching orders from higher powers (I don't claim to know who that might be). Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but look at the reality.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant. On a personal basis, Obama is clearly taking part in all this and is an accomplice.
  - rosser 13y ago
    Great, so he's an accomplice. I don't think very many people actually dispute that. I certainly don't. So fucking what? What does identifying him as an accomplice to the surveillance actually do? Does it make the surveillance somehow magically stop? Does it delete all the data the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other TLAs have about you from their databases? Or does it just serve to stoke your righteous indignation over getting fooled by yet another politician? When can we stop bickering over whose goddamned fault it is and start, you know, fixing it?

pessimizer 13y ago

I don't know what this comment is replying to. The parent seemed to blame Bush, Obama, and hypothetical future administrations. The desperation to completely absolve Obama based on claims of his office's powerlessness, Congress, or Bush is bizarre. It's also Greenwald's primary political critique, (not) coincidentally. Obama has been involved with this from the first day of his presidency until today, it's in his branch, he fought for immunity for telcos and reauthorized PATRIOT. If he had absolutely no ability to effect it, we should just stop having elections.