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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsObama’s “Dirty Wars” — and a soiled presidency
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/This is what its come to for Barack Obama: Reality has sunk in for many Americans, who at last understand that the guy we elected on the naive expectation that he would undo the excesses of the Bush-Cheney national security state has instead made them much worse. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to escape this legacy now. He is the drone president, the assassination president, the domestic-surveillance president, whose entire administration has a professionalized passion for secrecy that makes the low-rent paranoids of the Nixon White House look like Keystone Kops. I did not suspect that I would ever again find an occasion to quote a Sarah Palin gag line, but hey: How is that hopey-changey stuff workin out for ya?
There are numerous ways of understanding this disheartening turn of events. Maybe the secret note that George W. Bush left in the top drawer of the Resolute desk on Jan. 20, 2009, contained a Manchurian Candidate-style code word that switched on the programming! Or maybe, somewhat more plausibly, the entire secret apparatus of American counterterrorism at home and abroad has become an independent and self-replicating organism, a Hydra-headed monster that cant be killed. The president himself indirectly took that tack on Friday, when he tackled questions about the surveillance revelations for the first time, during a supposedly unrelated press conference.
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What Wyden was saying to me, says Scahill, was that whether its the kill program or its domestic surveillance or its certain secret aspects of the Patriot Act, there are laws that the American people can go online and read, and reasonable people will interpret those in relatively the same way. And then theres a second set of laws, which consist of the way the administration has interpreted what those laws say. So what hes saying to me is that on any of these issues, if I could tell you how theyve interpreted what you believe a law to say, it would shock you.
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We've gone through the looking glass.
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less."
newfie11
(8,159 posts)woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Sheepshank
(12,504 posts)deep anger? = again.
*predictable*
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)by those who live their own lives turning them on and off at will, depending on which party is in power.
Number23
(24,544 posts)That was a killer.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)Number23
(24,544 posts)Interesting those who find such tripe to be pithy and persuasive.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)Number23
(24,544 posts)that find those types of comments to be earth-shattering.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)done here
Number23
(24,544 posts)and then try so hard to act above it all when the other person ain't having it.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)...bullshit. I mean, "reality" sunk in for millions of Americans when they re-elected the President in a landslide. None of the bogus claims in that paragraph just came to light today or this year. They've been pushing this drivel for years.
Obama: PRISM Doesnt Apply To U.S. Citizens
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022965452
ACLU: DOJ Tells Court It's Reconsidering Secrecy Surrounding Patriot Act's Spying Powers
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022973455
Obama administraton releases details on Senate briefings
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022974680
Lady Freedom Returns
(14,120 posts)I am still shocked at the way people have allowed all these "scandals" to keep them from watching what else is going on on the Hill right now.
Bonobo
(29,257 posts)I mean, for example, you could have used either:
"This"
or
"This is"
but you chose, instead,
"This is such"
Does the number of words you put in your fragmented title indicate its relative importance?
"This"
...important
"This is"
but you chose, instead
....important posts are
"This is such"
...the most fragmented
...for maximum confusion and annoyance in posting style!
With links to myself for an illusion of fact sourcing!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=profile&uid=180011
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=profile&uid=180011&sub=recs
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=profile&uid=180011&sub=trans
this is an example of AAA importance post expression
Liberal_Stalwart71
(20,450 posts)Sometimes I just can't believe what people are saying. Sure a lot of what is going on is wrong, but this whole thing, along with the other "scandals" has been blown way out of proportion when people make comments about the president that sound the same was we would hear on fox news. If people are upset, call congress. If they don't want to believe what the president says, that's their choice, but when we start sounding like the right, when we start making comments that president Obama is the same as Bush, or that "reality has sunk in" that he like Nixon, and all the other BS, that's just insane!
All this crap is playing right into the right wings smear campaign to once again get the left, at least those gullible enough to buy into all there shit, to stay home like many did in 2010. The only difference I see now from then is there seems to be more poster here trying to stir things up, and most of them are not even trying to blend in, they just keep on posting their BS and causing trouble. How many new posters have we seen here lately that have only posted attacks on the president? I mean it's pretty obvious what is going on. Like I said write letters, call congress, work to change things, but so so many here fall in line and make the trolls job easier and attack anyone who tries to point out the facts instead of buying the crap!
uponit7771
(90,335 posts)MNBrewer
(8,462 posts)Others of us are sad, disappointed and frustrated about it.
morningfog
(18,115 posts)It is just sheer disappointment.
Andy823
(11,495 posts)But we don't need help the right by jumping on their talking points. We don't need to listen to the trolls that come here and try and stir thing up and make all president Obama's fault. I have seen so many obvious right wing trolls here the last few days who have only on goal, blame it all on the president, and sadly I have seen way to many here on DU that are following the trolls and that's sad.
morningfog
(18,115 posts)It is soiled and political capital has been squandered. It is going to be a long three years of a lame duck.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"He is losing the message, the frame and his carefully cultivated image. It is soiled and political capital has been squandered. It is going to be a long three years of a lame duck."
People were making the same silly claims when the declared Obama deserved to be dumped. It was an anti-Obama celebration.
The President won re-election by a landslide. It's the same people pushing the same tired shit.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)it had more to do with the fucking joke he ran against than a true ringing endorsement - LOTS of people voted against Romney
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"it had more to do with the fucking joke he ran against than a true ringing endorsement - LOTS of people voted against Romney"
Millions voted for Obama, and it was still a landslide.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)so STOP saying I resent him - I DO NOT - STOP with your efforts to demonize people who disagree with the rightwing CRAP he pulls
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"I VOTED FOR OBAMA - TWICE so STOP saying I resent him - I DO NOT - STOP with your efforts to demonize people who disagree with the rightwing CRAP he pulls "
...and stop screaming and putting word in my mouth. Oh, and there is some irony in there.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)FUCK YES you do - it seems to be ALL you care about
you do OK when you can respond using links from your vast database but like offshore folk you FLOUNDER when you go off-script
ProSense
(116,464 posts)Romulus Quirinus
(524 posts)hamster
(101 posts)She's just so damned annoying. Broken record. blah blah blah blah.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)Skittles
(153,150 posts)summer-hazz
(112 posts)I want to vote FOR someone again before I die...
Skittles
(153,150 posts)I do too!!!
dennis4868
(9,774 posts)never abused his power? Court packing?
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)He wanted 3 more judges on the Supreme Court to make 12 in all so that he could get important parts of his New Deal accepted to help victims of the Depression, but was foiled in his attempt. Hardly what I would call "abusing power".
Cha
(297,154 posts)utter disingenous bullshit. That poster's wishing it so.. doesn't mean shite.
Makes me want to get out the tinyest violin for him
ProSense
(116,464 posts)they remind me of the people who can't get over the President's re-election. They failed to stop him and they're still trying to attack his credibility.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/romney-leading-democrat-thought-i-was-going-to?
Skittles
(153,150 posts)that these same DUers you trash VOTED FOR OBAMA, don't you???
ProSense
(116,464 posts)Cha
(297,154 posts)who is Soiled. It's all the creepy bloggers who sink to shit like that.
Oh, and fuck sarah palin and anyone who uses her hopey changey thing.. idiots.
The Big Change with the Obama Admin has been excellent.. for those who are not in their ignorant tunnel.
morningfog
(18,115 posts)His second term is proving to be an abysmal failure. No meaningful policies are getting off the ground. Three years of a lame duck, sadly.
Cha
(297,154 posts)morningfog
(18,115 posts)of Obama is DU.
Cha
(297,154 posts)out there.
like to see some positive reads about him.
I voted for, and worked hard to get him elected.
I need more than this.. I am disappointed and
very tired of "scandal"!
Its got to stop, and real work be done!
Cha
(297,154 posts)You have to sift through but it's on DU and other blogs as well.
summer-hazz
(112 posts)Cha... I will keep hopeing and reading.
morningfog
(18,115 posts)never had anything good to say. I can't stand them and don't talk to them about anything. The democrats I know range from disappointed and frustrated to totally pissed off to completely jaded and disengaged. The apolitical and radical I know feel vindicated.
The ONLY place I see absolute defense and support 100% of the time is when in us an official spokesperson, or one of the few here on DU. Curious thing.
JoePhilly
(27,787 posts)I struggle to find anyone in the real world who is half has "upset" as the perpetually disgruntled folks here.
Same folks who wanted a primary challenge, still pissed that Obama won a second term.
They'll probably be just a pissed when Hillary wins in 2016, if not more so.
morningfog
(18,115 posts)There are worse mixes possible, I suppose.
JoePhilly
(27,787 posts)jumps from topic of outrage to topic of outrage on about a weekly basis.
I felt bad for a guy the other day. He was pissed, and posted an OP about something Obama said regarding alternative energy sources. Apparently he felt Obama was backtracking.
His poor OP got buried in the swirling sea of NSA outrage. After it sat there all day, I suggested he re-post it in about a week when he might get better traction.
sheshe2
(83,746 posts)We are doomed, doomed I say.
Cha
(297,154 posts)hamster
(101 posts)who listen to other people's phone conversations are creepy, not bloggers who blog about it.
Cha
(297,154 posts)even know.. they are gathering phone records and patterns and not "listening" to them.
Occulus
(20,599 posts)They never collected meticulous records, either, restricted to paper as they were. It was just too hard for them to amass vast stores of records on more than 2/3 of the East German population.
Oh, wait.
hamster
(101 posts)nashville_brook
(20,958 posts)he's such an impressive journo...and the film looks to be amazing. his photography alone is worrth the admission.
joelz
(185 posts)gross crimenality some more from dn
From drone strikes to the massacre at al-Majalah, secret U.S. military actions inside Yemen are exposed in "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield," the new documentary film by Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley opening today. Scahills book by the same name was published in April. We continue our conversation on Yemen with Scahill and two key Yemenis profiled in the film: Nasser al-Awlaki, who lost his son, cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and 16-year-old grandson to U.S. drone strikes; and Saleh bin Fareed, the Yemeni sheikh and tribal leader who was one of the first people to arrive at the site of the U.S. attack of al-Majalah that killed 45 civilians in 2009.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/7/inside_the_us_dirty_war_in
PSPS
(13,591 posts)Remember how bush would take any bill passed and simply, by the magic of a "signing statement," declare the bill would amount to whatever suited him and his cabal? With Obama, it has become even more grotesque. Not only do we now have "secret laws," we also have "secret interpretations of the secret laws" which is another way of saying "secret signing statements."
And how do you kill this surveillance monster? With its permanent digital dossiers of everyone's email, web travels, phone calls and every other facet of what should be our private lives available for perusal and misuse with a few keystrokes, it is invincible. Nobody could touch J. Edgar Hoover during his 37-year tenure at the FBI because he kept dossiers. What we're dealing with here is much, much worse.
MNBrewer
(8,462 posts)Secret laws......
What have we come to?
sheshe2
(83,746 posts)You do too!
Read the History of FISA and what in Fact The President did!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/110210510
SNIP
Hearing about FISA in a vacuum without any other information would probably cause most people to believe that FISA has the strong potential to violate the fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. In fact, FISA was created to strengthen the fourth amendment and I will explain how.
FISA was created by Ted Kennedy for two reasons. First, it was created as a response to President Nixon using warrantless wiretaps and other searches to target political opponents and activist groups. The other reason it was created was made clear by one of the US Court of appeals decisions that affirmed the constitutionality of FISA, and that is the 1984 US v Duggan decision.
SNIP:
When campaigning for President in 2008, then senator Obama vigorously attacked President Bushs warrantless wiretapping program and vowed to stop the practice. That is exactly what he did. President Obama returned to the policies before President Bush of using the Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter FISA law to obtain warrants wherever this kind of surveillance would be performed.
No, he has not made thins worse. Please read the excerpt and full article at the link!
summer-hazz
(112 posts)I needed something positive.
All these so called "scandals" are keeping my heart rate up!
sheshe2
(83,746 posts)Calm and steady. There are positive posts here.
Welcome to DU!
Deep breath~ better!
It was a great read from stevenleser!
summer-hazz
(112 posts)sheshe2!
Yes, I'm fine, lol... I just need some positive reading from
time to time, to keep me on track....I laugh a lot when I'm on DU..
Some of the posts are so clever, and snarky I laugh out loud..
I do a lot of digging everyday and love that I found
DU in doing so. I feel so at home...
FB is exhausting, and frustrating where im from.
I personally know most of the ppl there, as usual, from high school.
It seems they are stuck in 1974, and didn't graduate, but walked as if they had.
The ones that can't speak proper English, spell, or write a sentence, of course are Republicans.... we just had our city elections..
Elected... all white, all male, all republicans.
Im considered a trader, and possibly a terrorist by most. They hide my posts... lmao...
Oh, I had no ideal what some of them were really like
until the last Prez campaign. Frightening!!!!
I think they all hate me... I'm cool with that, especially when
I am able to call them out on their made up BS from the red right.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)Sunlei
(22,651 posts)Arctic Dave
(13,812 posts)He will go down in history as a guy won the presidency because the other guy was a lunatic and not because he was a great statesmen.
I'm sure his speaking fees will be enough to console him once he leaves office.
boxman15
(1,033 posts)I find this NSA scandal horrid, but what proof does he have that the American people have turned on Barack Obama? There is none.
Sure, this is now part of his legacy (enshrining Bush-era surveillance policies in stone). But, it is impossible to ignore the rest of his remarkable record of achievement as president domestically and abroad.
This is ridiculous.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
boxman15
(1,033 posts)But that further undermines his claim.
The collective reaction to the NSA scandal has fallen somewhere in between "meh" and "Well, that's messed up, but I have nothing to hide, so I don't care."
I wish there was more outrage, but there's not. I agree this is not a healthy program for us to have (indeed, it undermines our democracy), and it is extremely disappointing coming from the Obama administration, but his claim that the American people have turned on Obama has no proof.
His other claim, that he'll only be remembered as the guy who spied on you and dropped drones on people, is also absurd. His legacy, for better or worse, hinges on the economy and the implementation of the health care law. If those go well, he'll be remembered as the guy who saved the economy, brought at least a bit of sanity to American health care, and left protections in place to make sure we don't end up back in the clusterfuck we found ourselves in in 2008.
And that's to say nothing on any of his hundreds of others of accomplishments at home and abroad.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
appacom
(296 posts)Wake up, people. Obama ain't Bush, and you need to grab ahold of yourselves.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"Maybe Obama Should Have Thought About That Before He Claimed To Be The Transparent President"
And he can still make that claim. That's the problem with a lot of the criticism, it's apparently based on throwing Obama's words back at him based on whatever the drama of the day is.
No other Presidency has been as transparent, regardless of what you believe.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)35 promises re: transparency
13 Fully realized
10 Mostly kept
12 Broken
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/subjects/transparency/?page=1
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
humbled_opinion
(4,423 posts)data collection effort before the whistleblower came out? Transparency and leakage are mutually exclusive.
appacom
(296 posts)And, your thinking is simplistic.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
burnodo
(2,017 posts)Can't Democrats just win on their own merits? If people are so easily swayed, shouldn't Democrats be able to sway them back?
are you fu**ing kidding me??? You turn your back on OUR president? He ain't perfect but damn what do you expect in this political climate???
Astrad
(466 posts)in really horrible ways. It would take another transformational president to undo what he did. Barack Obama does not appear to be a transformational president.
humbled_opinion
(4,423 posts)failed in their own Democratic principles. The President has not lived up to his own standards, let alone Democratic standards, liberal standards and certainly not Progressive standards this can be proven based on the comments that he made during his own 2008 campaign, now he can try to explain to the American people why Bush was right, or he can try and explain why he had no choice but to continue what is clearly wrong, or he can do nothing and continue to run the most secretive, civil liberties destroying presidency in our nations history. Either way he will be judged by history for this, and those that care about his legacy beyond 2016 do him no favors by coddling him in this regard.
IOW's he certainly isn't running for re-election again but we will have a Democratic candidate to be the standard bearer, she would be wise to speak out soon on the abuses of power we are witnessing.
aquart
(69,014 posts)The new president inherited the power Bush accrued. Unchecked.
It wasn't Obama's job to dismantle that power apparatus. It was ours. We didn't bother.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
aquart
(69,014 posts)The rich will always be with us as we are a greedy, conniving species.
And if they keep on like this our gun massacres may start to get more interesting. Who knows? When the railroad richies tried to cover some losses by cutting worker pay to below starvation level, this nation erupted from sea to shining sea. It was unpleasant, bloody, and so terrifying to Congress that all kinds of fun legislation was enacted.
Right now, Congress is more scared of the Kochs and their parasitic ilk. Their compulsion to cut food stamps will not be good for them.
humbled_opinion
(4,423 posts)President Sarah Palin will do with these Democratically approved Surveillance measures.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)What you said is precisely it. It was our job to do so. A friend of mine wrote this in 2007 and your post made me go dig through my emails for it.
America on its Knees Before Tyranny
03/02/07
By Richard Mynick
"The Star-Spangled Banner" painted the United States in 1814 as "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."
These words, though still mumbled by apathetic consumers at sporting events, amount to a cruel satire of the American people in 2007.
The 4th sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads "...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (ie, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness) it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..." It would be hard to find a more apt description of the US government in 2007, or a more appropriate remedy for this oppressive regime, increasingly loathed and feared by the citizenry.
We have a Constitution which defines a separation of powers. It also defines procedures for impeaching officials who violate its bedrock principles -- in particular, its Bill of Rights, its separation of powers, and its foundational notion that power derives from the consent of the governed. We make elected officials swear an oath to "protect and defend" this Constitution. Why bother with all this, if, when the day of tyranny finally arrives, the Constitution's own provisions are not used to defend the document's principles against the would-be tyrants who have so egregiously violated them?
In November, US voters told Washington that the public does not support the war; sees with increasing clarity that it is immoral and was launched on false pretexts; and wants it terminated. In response, Vice-Emperor Cheney snarled in a TV interview with an obsequious Bush toady that regardless of what the public or Congress might say about it, the White House intends not only to continue the war, but to escalate it.
Let's examine this extraordinary position. Here is a top official of a "democracy" -- in a war marketed as an effort to "spread democracy" -- stating publicly & with imperial scorn that he and his co-conspirators have the right to order the US war machine to bombard and occupy any nation they wish to target, even if their war is launched under demonstrably false pretexts. They claim the right to compel the public to furnish lives and bodies to be killed and maimed in the war, and to bear the moral and financial burdens of the war, in an action which not incidentally lets administration allies in the "defense" and oil industries profit handsomely from the ensuing mayhem. Needless to say, from Cheney's viewpoint, it's also of no moment that the war violates the Nuremberg Principles and UN Charter forbidding aggressive war, and that the conduct of the war violates international accords to which the US is a signatory.
If that position does not constitute tyranny and abuse of power, what would? The "long train of abuses and usurpations" cited against King George in the Declaration of Independence was no worse an abuse of power than this. And nothing Britain ever did to its American colonies came anywhere near the monstrous outrages perpetrated by the US on modern-day Iraq.
The war in Iraq is not merely "the most serious foreign policy blunder in American history," as even members of the political establishment have conceded. It represents, rather, a crisis derived from the decaying framework of the US political system, posing the most fundamental question about the relationship between the rulers and ruled in this country. Though the Bush regime led the way, the war is the joint product of both parties and the corporate media -- that is, of the entire political establishment -- with each part playing its own supporting role.
It's not a question of "Well, if only Gore had won in 2000, we wouldn't be in this mess." The mess springs from the very structure of US society -- the unequal distribution of power among its social classes, its economic and political relations with the rest of the world, its ruling ideology. As errors go, there's an immense qualitative difference between a system malfunctioning because its framework is rotting, & the more limited type of error due to a component glitch within an otherwise healthy framework. The war in Iraq is the first type of malfunction: systemic.
The official forms of discourse in US society have degenerated to the point that they no longer permit acknowledgement -- or even mention -- of the main issues confronting us. The problems run too deep. The issues which must be discussed, because they're so important, cannot be discussed, because they're too threatening to the powers controlling the system.
The crises facing our society are like those an individual must confront, when events force upon him a choice of either internally acknowledging a dark & terrible truth about himself, or continuing in denial. The truth seems too terrible to bear -- so the denial continues, & the pressure of the crisis intensifies.
What would a genuine discussion of the issues look like?
If we were to attempt a genuine discussion of the Bush regime, one might formulate the main issues as these:
-- Is the regime legitimate? After all, it took office by what millions recognize was a stolen election enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court and the president's brother's political machine in Florida.
-- Is the regime guilty of massive war crimes? After all, they invaded a country that posed no threat to the US, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and have permanently destroyed Iraqi society in their rush to plunder its oil. (This, while not permitting the slightest acknowledgement that oil has anything to do with it.)
-- Is the regime guilty of high crimes against the Constitution? They have eavesdropped on millions of citizens. They torture detainees, many of whom are probably guilty of little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have repealed such basic democratic rights as habeas corpus, smeared political opponents, pandered to rightwing theocrats, stacked the judiciary & federal agencies with political cronies, and quietly sneaked into legislation passages making easier the declaration of martial law.
-- Is the regime a de facto dictatorship? After all, not only do they insist that the president can label anyone an "enemy combatant" and then disappear them; not only do they openly assert their belief in the "unitary executive;" they have also created an artificial state of permanent war, then claimed that a "nation at war" must grant its executive unlimited powers. They have openly claimed the right to wage war on anyone, even on false pretexts, using our bodies & tax dollars to feed a war machine owned by their cronies -- and added with sneering condescension that we have no say in any of this. Anyone who objects is a traitor! All this, in the name of "protecting Americans, freedom and democracy!"
The mainstream media are unwilling to even recognize the existence of such questions. Their comfort zones and expertise are better suited to "reporting" on the astronaut/love-triangle/diaper story, or the intriguing battles raging over Anna Nicole's corpse. There's a story in today's news that Iraq's cabinet has approved a draft of a new "oil law," which would largely turn control of Iraq's oil over to Western oil companies. But we know by now that Anna Nicole's corpse will get far more press in the days ahead, and that no media "analyst" will perceive any noteworthy connection between the new oil law and the Iraq War, originally launched because of imaginary WMD's. (That little boo-boo is regularly ascribed by the media to "flawed intelligence," an interesting phrase deserving further examination, if, against rising odds, we survive the next several months without a world-altering conflagration.)
What does it mean to "Support the Troops?"
In the giddy prosperity following WWII, it became commonplace in American culture to sneer contemptuously about the German soldiers who defended their wartime actions by claiming they were "just following orders." Underlying these sneers was the principle set forth at Nuremberg -- that a soldier has a moral responsibility to refuse to obey orders which their conscience tells them violate a higher ethical code.
In today's United States, however, courageous and principled soldiers like Lt. Ehren Watada, who try to do exactly what Americans sneered at German soldiers for not doing, are jailed, court-martialed, and summarily dismissed by the press as "insubordinate."
"Supporting the Troops" should mean supporting soldiers like Watada, and removing the troops from situations where they must kill or be killed in an unjust war. It should mean prosecuting the venal figures in Washington who have sent the troops on this criminal mission, and lied to the world about the reasons for it. Yet these same venal politicians, who won't even adequately fund medical facilities for maimed soldiers, shamelessly use the phrase "supporting the troops" as an argument for forcing them to continue fighting a war for oil and defense company profits.
The Treacherous Role of the Democrats
The Democrats gained control of Congress only by virtue of the fact that they are not Republicans, under conditions where the electorate instructed them to oppose Bush's deranged warmongering. Though "victorious," they immediately surrendered to the Republicans, taking "off the table" the only two measures which could possibly stop the US war drive: impeachment and cutting off funding for the war. They then wasted two months fussing ineffectually with non-binding resolutions of feeble disapproval (of the "surge," not the war itself), bleating pitifully to their Republican colleagues for "bipartisanship." Almost comically, the toothless Senate resolution didn't even make it to the floor for a vote. It should be clear from this performance that the Democrats, like the media, are terminally corrupt, and are in effect collaborating with the Bush regime against the voters who put them in office.
We have before us the spectacle of the Bush administration committing crimes which, if attempted by any foreign power, would rightly be met by torrential denunciation from Congress and the US media. But when the Bush administration commits these crimes, the media is basically supportive, while the Democrats make cynical pretenses of opposition. The Democrats' "criticism" usually amounts to complaining that Bush's crimes were clumsily executed or not entirely successful; and that had they been at the helm they could have pulled off the capers with more finesse.
Corruption is present to some degree in all governments, but the critical test of whether a government is beyond all salvation is whether it has the capacity to acknowledge great crimes committed by the leadership, and to rectify them. In today's Washington, however, the Democrats function as a buffer between the Bush regime and the increasingly angry population. On the one hand, the Democrats posture dishonestly as administration "critics"; on the other hand, they ensure that no serious effort is made to rein the criminals in -- not to mention bringing them to justice.
Rectifying the corruption should include restoration of the staggering wealth that in effect has been stolen from the American people, when Bush and Cheney ladled it out to their friends at Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, the oil companies, and the other defense industries. The $400 million CEO severance packages, the billions in non-bid government contracts to defense companies and mercenaries, Cheney's own Halliburton stock options -- all this and more should be confiscated, and returned to the rightful possessors of that wealth. It should be clear that the Democrats would scarcely be able to comprehend what is being spoken of, here, let alone act as honorable advocates of its implementation.
Today's America is no democracy -- it's a degenerating tyranny, disfigured by its military-industrial-governmental cancer. Our people are increasingly ashamed and terrified of their government, and rightly so, because we have no control over it, and it's become a deceitful monstrous danger to us and to the health of the planet. We're not "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." To the contrary: We, the people, are on our knees, cringing and whimpering in dismay and confusion, prostrate before the forces that have betrayed us.
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Puzzledtraveller
(5,937 posts)moondust
(19,972 posts)has lost me at the outset.
Scahill is another charter member of the "trash everything" club along with Greenwald. I think they're basically Woodward/Bernstein wannabes.
LittleBlue
(10,362 posts)Back in 2007-8, I never imagined I was supporting this type of person. It's a tragedy, because we had the chance of a lifetime in 2008 to really change things.
Obama has been mediocre at best and arguably harmful to the Democratic Party by bipartisan-izing abuses of power. 2016 can't come fast enough.