CCCToad on 22/10/2010 at 23:43

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For quite a bit of that, its definitely correct. All the hype about "family values" is the best example.

However, thats not correct as blanket statement because quite a bit of the crazy agenda has made progress. Many of Bush's anti-privacy policies have been passed into law, and there's quite a few instances where Beltway thinking on due process has been found regressive even when compared to third world countries like Kenya and Iran. Both of those countries have allowed terrorists and suspected "enemy agents" to face trial rather than being detained in a classified black hole. Meanwhile, the Obama administration argues that it is acceptable to assassinate a US citizen with no due process.

Hell, if you think that Bush's authoritarian agenda made no progress, do some of your own research on which countries are the most expansive surveillance states. The only countries worse than the US are regimes like China and North Korea.

theBlackman on 23/10/2010 at 02:37

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Agreed Show me the documentation. A link to that specific statement or other non-blog confirmation.

No news columnist opinion but a direct verifiable quote.

I don't think I have ever read one of your rants that provided solid confirmation of your paranoid statements. I may have missed one, but I doubt it. I've read a lot of inane posts over the years, but you seem to pile them up by the page.

I know that attempting to show you solid facts that refute your babbling is a useless endeavor. You are one of those opinionated, ill-informed, jump at any statement that seems to fit your warped views individuals with a mind that says, "Don't confuse me with facts. My mind is made up."

Or to put it bluntly, you exhibit a mind like a steel trap... RUSTED SHUT.

fett on 23/10/2010 at 05:23

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What's your point CCC? Intelligence agencies believe the man is participating in terrorist attacks, and the hit was approved by the National Security Council. Is this something done out of hand, simply because Obama doesn't like his politics? The man appears to be well-known as a "global terrorist" by every major security organization in the free world. Are we to take from this singular case that a precedent is being set by the Obama administration to start assassinating American citizens? Someone with more legal background than I will have to comment, but I think due process can and should be waived when the individual has clearly been identified in, and confessed to terrorist acts on his own countrymen, with a malicious intent to kill large numbers of people. If iit can't/shouldn't, I don't think it warrants much concern from law-abiding citizens who aren't, ya know, training and recruiting Al Qaeda members. The far right bitches about Obama being soft on terrorism, now they'll bitch about this. He can't win no matter what he does. because he's black

That said, this is another perfect example of the far right taking a single incident and acting like it's the new status quo, or "the direction Amurica is headed," because they are incapable of processing information more involved than a protest sign or a Palin quote. These are clearly extraordinary circumstances and it IS a rare thing - I imagine it will continue to be a rare thing, unless you're looking for a bogeyman behind every tree in which case OH MY GOD HE'S HITLER WE'RE BECOMING A DICTATORSHIP.

So what exactly are you getting at?

CCCToad on 23/10/2010 at 14:50

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I actually haven't heard any rage about this on the right. Most either don't know about or are that "Islamic extremism" is being fought by any means necessary.

Its those on the left who are upset about the policy.

Rug Burn Junky on 23/10/2010 at 19:04

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The ones on the right who are angry about it are just like CCCToad - concern trolls. They spent 8 years oblivious to the fact that Bush increased civil rights abuses against pretty much everyone, including innocent American citizens, and try to paint an equivalence that Barack is just as bad... heck he's worse, because he's going to "assassinate a citizen." It's almost par for the course as to how they treated the Bush deficit.

But it doesn't stand up, Obama actually makes an effort to stop the worst of the abuses. He's not engaging in extraordinary rendition just to find out who stole Cheney's sandwich from the fridge. He's not sending new people to Guantanamo just because they wrote bad things about Poppy Bush on an internet message board. Yes, he's allowed some of them to persist - but there's a huge difference between retaining expanded powers, and actually expanding them yourself. That's one of the damaging legacies of Bush - if Obama carte blanche admits that so many of the things Bush did were fucked up, it hamstrings him from other legitimate exercises of power - especially when he'd be faced with the conservitards screaming their heads off over them. Do I wish he's done more? Fuck yeah. But it's still an improvement and slows down that fucked-up shit that Cheney was pushing.
Plus when he tries to roll back some of them (Guantanamo), the right wing demagogues in the congress scream their heads off about it, and throw up roadblocks at every turn.

I'm not naive enough to think that CIA black-ops stuff hasn't been going on for years. Targeted assassinations, under the table weapons deals with Real Bad Guys, torture and the like. But they were "Black Ops" for a reason. They were not approved because there's something wrong about them, even if they may in fact have been necessary. I'll even concede that at times, on balance, they would be a good thing results wise - the Jack Bauer scenarios. But the key is that if they're never approved, at least that creates a barrier to doing them - because Jack Bauer and anyone who gave him a green light are supposed to go to prison. Period. The entire legacy of Bush/Cheney the past 8 years was to say "hey' we're doing it anyway, why not just fucking be open about it." which sorta ruins it for everybody, because they don't get the importance of the secrecy aspect - it's NOT justifiable as a policy, even if it IS justifiable in extreme circumstances. You never want people to feel fucking conflicted about it because it should be an extreme use of power.

So when Obama does actually expand one power and do something extreme and questionable like targeting al-Awlaki, it's news not because it's so bad in and of itself - it's in that grey area where one could justify it - but because it's raised to the point where it's in the chain of command. Bush/Cheney has exploded that grey area and abused the same sorts of powers so much that these things that would never be raised openly before have to be explicitly OKed up and down the line. And because it's now being explicitly discussed it's not being treated as a one-off, but as policy - If it's presidential it's precedental.

Right now, you have a constitutional scholar who isn't out-to-kill-muslims-by-any-means-necessary, weighing the positives and negatives of the situation and making the decision. I disagree with that decision, but anyone who's paying attention can see that some sort of deliberation went into it. Counterweight that with Bush, whose thought process never seemed to go deeper than "I'm the Decider, fuck it. We're doin' it!" and project that out to a Palin presidency or the like. That opens the door for others later to make the same decision on a much more whimsical basis. That is what should give pause to anyone rational about setting that sort of precedent. Even under Greenwald's analysis, Oabama's the least worst choice to be in this situation, but it's setting us up for fucktards to ruin it later.

THAT is the difference between "extreme" and "Just fucking crazy" that defines the Tea party. It's anti-intellectual, which leads to bad decision making as a matter of course, rather than as an occasional outcome. It's exactly that sort of distinction that CCCTard just ignorantly fails to grasp.