Tag: Barak Obama

  Perhaps the worst insult you can hurl at a politician these days is to give him the middle name of “Hoover”.

  Such as George Hoover Bush and Barack Hoover Obama. 80 years later Herbert Hoover is still the standard for the “do-nothing” president in the face of economic collapse.

 Like most easy comparisons, these examples lack details. That’s because the names are there for the purpose of accusation, rather than enlightenment.

 However, if you dig down into the individual economic policies of Hoover, Bush, and Obama, the story gets much more interesting.

 As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I’m not going to try and find direct connections in this essay, just broad picture comparisons. If the reader confuses the two, then that will only mean I was justified in writing this.

This morning Glen Greenwald posed this hypothetical question regarding the outrage over Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s citizenship stripping bill and President Barak Obama’s assassination policy:

Outrage over Lieberman’s citizen-stripping bill is odd in light of Obama’s assassination program: which would you rather have done to you?

Neither Lieberman’s bill or Obama’s Policy provide for due process.

Hopefully, Lieberman’s bill stands no chance getting even to the Senate floor but President Obama’s assassination policy is already in place.

Do either of these men, who have sworn to uphold the law and protect the Constitution, believe in its core principles?

In an Op-Ed on 4/12/2010, Robert Wright wrote about President Obama’s authorization to target a US citizen for assassination and his use of unarmed drones to kill Al Qaeda leaders in villages in Pakistan.

I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 20 years ago that America would someday be routinely firing missiles into countries it’s not at war with. For that matter, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a few months ago that America would soon be plotting the assassination of an American citizen who lives abroad.

Shows you how much I know. President Obama, who during his first year in office oversaw more drone strikes in Pakistan than occurred during the entire Bush presidency, last week surpassed his predecessor in a second respect: he authorized the assassination of an American – Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, a base from which he inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber.

Anybody remember this?

Monday, April 14, 2008 Obama would ask his AG to “immediately review” potential of crimes in Bush White House

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted — but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.

Or this

Turley: Obama ‘owns’ Bush ‘war crimes’ if he looks the other way

David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Raw Story

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

President George W. Bush’s offhand acknowledgement in an interview Sunday with Fox’s Brit Hume that he personally authorized the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may create thorny legal and moral problems for incoming President Barack Obama.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Monday, “We now have President Bush speaking quite candidly that he was in the loop, we have Dick Cheney who almost bragged about it. The question for Barack Obama is whether he wants to own part of this by looking the other way.”

Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, “We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.”

All most bragged about it? How about admitted it. Not only did the media “yawn”, so did the Obama and the Justice Department

Is President Obama sanctioning the assassinations of American citizens without due process just as George W, Bush did? It would appear that is exactly what he is doing.

President Obama has now extended Bush’s “War on Terror” to Yemen. In today’s Washington Post there is an article by Dana Priest where she writes:

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.

snip

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.

(emphasis mine)

triangulate

equivocate

prevaricate

capitulate

appease

deceive

manipulate

These are not sins inside the Washington bubble, where they are seen as business as usual by the eternally morally-challenged.  But they are the reasons most Americans dislike and distrust politicians.  Why?  Because they are Destructive and Dishonest and most people understand that.  We thought, hoped, that Barak Obama understood that as well.  Apparently not.

And the growing exposure of his moral ambiguity is the reason some are now losing faith in Barak Obama.  Because he’s committing every one of these “sins”.

First, he packed the White House with un-liberals.  Conflicting “leaks” come out of the White House almost daily.  He’s spinning on health care.  He’s refused to pursue violent and illegal torturers.  He’s refused to even investigate out-and-out war criminals from the previous administration.  He insists on appeasing openly obstructive Republicans and Blue Dogs.  His adminstration was willing to spend billions for Wall Street, and reluctant to support Main Street and Labor.  He’s ramping up of the war in Afganistan, despite a dismal outlook for achieving anything useful there.  He appointed what can best be described as a “centerist” Supreme Court Justice.  He’s openly disdainful of public education. (Despite having never attended a public school in the United States).

We hoped Barak Obama was different.  He SAID he was going to be different.  He dangled hope for change with the consumate skill of a seasoned huckster or televangelist. (Same difference.)

What some of us worried about before the election, but hardly dared express for fear of being stomped into oblivion, was that he was too inexperienced to stand fast for the people’s needs in the moral sinkhole that is Washington.  

Apparently we had reason for our reservations, because Barak Obama seems to be diving headfirst into the muck.  He has a choice now.  He can pull back from the brink and regain his credibility.  Or he can sink.

Happy Monday and welcome all to the Dog’s ongoing letter writing campaign. The basic idea it to write to decision and opinion makers every Monday to keep the issue of accountability for torture through respect for the rule of law alive and in front of the busy people who run our country. For those who are stopping by for the first time, it works like this, the Dog writes a letter and provides the links. You can either cut and paste the letter or use it as inspiration for your own. The big deal is to get as many people as possible sending letters (or e-mails) on a consistent basis. To the Dog this provides a low level but constant reminder this issue is out important to the people of this nation.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

Welcome to the 12th in the Dog’s letter writing campaign series. This basic idea of this series is to write to decision and opinion makers every week to push for accountability on for the Bush era State Sponsored Torture program. The Dog writes the letters and provides the links for each week, you provide the action by either cutting and pasting the letter or by using its topic to write your own letter. This is a low level type of action but it is by being relentless and consistent that we keep the pressure on those who can either start investigations or take actions which will make the need for action clearer.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net”  

Okay so the Dog has not been around this week (if you care he has been at Caterpillar Production System for Dealers training, which is a 6 Sigma Lean methodology for transforming value streams instead of single processes. Everyone’s eyes glazed over yet?) so of course it is likely that most of the hot topics have been blogged to death, but cut a hound some slack as he sits at O’Hare waiting for his flight home, eh?  

This is the eighth in Dog’s letter writing campaign. For those joining us in the middle the basic idea is that each week the Dog creates a letter which you, the home audience can cut and paste and send to the following list of officials:

President Obama

AG Holder

Speaker Pelosi

Majority Leader Reid

Justices of the Supreme Court

Of course you can send it to your Senators and Representative as well, but the point is to get a steady drum beat of letters to these folks in the hopes that they will read some of them and take action on the issue of the Bush administrations State Sponsored Torture program.

This week’s letter is going to be addressed to AG Holder, with copies to all of the others.