Jim Henley on pervasive lawlessness and the role Barack Obama has played in it:
Abandoning the rule of law certainly provides, as it were, the ruling class with “security.” They can get away with enormities themselves, and get away with ever more blatantly high-handed measures against anyone less powerful who opposes them or is simply inconvenient. It’s a nice racket. As for what Barack Obama has to do with all of this, which is what John’s post speculates on, the answer appears to be, nothing consequential. His first and possibly last consequential act was to leave the real centers of American government power – Defense, Treasury and the Chair of the Federal Reserve – in the hands of the supposed opposition party. Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a Democratic White House allowed Republicans to destroy the effectiveness of key components of the liberal base – ACORN; the SEIU; etc. – with a succession of fake scandals, never lifting a finger to defend the people and organizations who did the actual work to get them elected.
I have a hard time arguing with that.
In related news, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has resigned after he criticized the deplorable treatment of Bradley Manning in military custody.
March 14, 2011 at 2:07 pm
How can Obama (and the Teabagger Politicians) keep their supporters? I could see only that the fear of getting in someone worse to be a motivator, but fear is a weak one and not sustainable.
Personally, Obama has lost my vote. His sell-out on Healthcare Reform (single-payer); his refusal to prosecute Dubyah, Cheney, Rumpsfeld, et. al., for war crimes; his refusal to support the Geneva Conventions; his broken campaign promise to close camp X-Ray, get us out of iraq; his refusal to wind down the losing Afghanistan war; his retention and expansion of illegal Bush-era powers and the torture and maltreatment of PFC. Manning are just a few of the reasons.
I was a state-delegate for Obama last time. I will not support him this time and will do my best to go to state for whomever opposes him.
March 14, 2011 at 3:38 pm
I think it’s silly to blame Obama for the lack of a single payer option for health care. Nobody can cite any time at which it was possible to get 60 votes for such a plan in the US Senate.
March 14, 2011 at 7:23 pm
It would be difficult at this point in time to argue against the notion that the two political parties (at least those elements of the two parties that end up exercising power) are not dramatically different in their unstated goals.
Broadly speaking their agenda seems to be to decrease citizen participation in government, increase the wealth of the plutocrats and corporations and enhance their (the governments) power to quash dissent or objections of any serious kind to these never overtly admitted goals.
March 16, 2011 at 3:02 am
…one obvious answer to that is to do away with the “winner take all” voting system, but good luck getting that to happen.
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~croft/research/government/approval/voting.html