Obama Continues to Disappoint Civil Libertarians
Thursday, August 23, 2012
One of my favorite writers, Glenn Greenwald, is now at the Guardian. He continues to grill the current administration on issues dealing with civil liberties, war and terrorism. Unfortunately, outside of blogs and media outlets that deal primarily with civil liberties, the MSM really isn't interested in talking about these things. For that matter, most people don't really seem all that interested. His latest OpEd discusses the administration's strange secrecy practices, which seem to be let secrets out when it may help reelection and don't when it might hurt. I understand that there are legitimate security concerns, but it does seem odd to allow a Navy SEAL that was on that raid to publish an account of the mission, while John Kerry tells reporters asking about it to, "shut up and move on." Even more disturbing is how this administration has gone after whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate (double all of the previous administrations combined). Greenwald referenced a Mother Jones article that does a good job of highlighting some of the recent abuses. Is this healthy?
2 comments:
Is this healthy? No. And there are a lot of people on the left who are bothered by much of this (though I am not sure about the bin Laden raid part).
But how about a show of hands for those who think that any of that will get better under a Republican? I am afraid that many on the left (and middle) are willing to risk the dangerous extremism of Romney and Ryan in order to push some idea of purity. Would I like Obama to be better on all of these issues? Absofreakinglutely. But I would prefer that someone who is at least in close proximity to reality run things rather than the psychopaths on the right.
I agree that it probably won't get any better. There seems to be a slow rise in power of the executive branch over the past 40 or so years that hasn't been slowed by Congress or the Courts. I would certainly prefer someone that I agree with, but the problem comes when we inevitably get someone from the "other side."
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