Category Archives: Obama 44

It’s hard to think of a single area of U.S. policy where then candidate Obama promised change and now President Obama has not completely reversed his former position and reverted to the policies of Bush & Co. Some may call Obama a socialist, but he has moved his position on almost every single issue, a shift that he himself seems to justify as finding middle ground; ironically the middle is in right field. I guess the only change we can believe in now is Obama’s change of heart.

In a series of excellent articles over the past few days, Glenn Greenwald has exposed many of the hypocrisies in Obama’s Bushness and Democrats’ acquiescence to that Bushness:

• How the U.S. government demands civilian trials for American who are suspects of terrorism in foreign countries on human rights grounds, but thinks there is nothing wrong with us denying terrorist suspects the same protection under U.S. law or even any sort of trial whatsoever. “Somehow, it was a grave violation of due process for [a foreign government] to try accused foreign Terrorists before military tribunals, but not for [the Obama Administration] to hold them for as long as we want with no charges of any kind.”
• The McCarthyite attack on detainee lawyers, unchallenged by either the Administration or Democrats.
• The Obama War on Whistleblowers, making this administration even less transparency-friendly than the Bush administration.
• How little attention is spent discussing the two indefinite wars during the present campaign season as the Democrats have institutionalized the Bush war machine. Just look at how the country spends its money. We are a warrior state. It is, sorry Mr. Voegeli, the Limitless Welfare Warfare State.
• Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review. Even if we may think we’re closing Guantanamo, the Obama Administration has argued and won a decision at the federal court level which allow it to deny any detainee anywhere in the world habeas review (that basic fundamental due process right to have your mere detention challenged) if the detainee is transferred to a detention center in a war zone. In other words, if we want to deny someone due process, all the administration need do is to move them to a war zone (aka, Bagram prison in Afghanistan) where the normal rules of justice vanish in thin air.

Few issues highlight Barack Obama’s extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world — far away from any battlefield — and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.  Back in the day, this was called “Bush’s legal black hole.”  In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo.  Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.

. . . This is what Barack Obama has done to the habeas clause of the Constitution:  if you are in Thailand (as one of the petitioners in this case was) and the U.S. abducts you and flies you to Guantanamo, then you have the right to have a federal court determine if there is sufficient evidence to hold you.  If, however, President Obama orders that you be taken to from Thailand to Bagram rather than to Guantanamo, then you will have no rights of any kind, and he can order you detained there indefinitely without any right to a habeas review.  That type of change is so very inspiring — almost an exact replica of his vow to close Guantanamo . . . all in order to move its core attributes (including indefinite detention) a few thousand miles North to Thompson, Illinois.

As IOZ writes,

Considered historically, it will become clear that the job of Republican governments is to invent novel, ad hoc expansions of state power, while the job of Democratic governments is to consolidate and systematize them. Far from repudiating supposed Bush-era “excesses,” the Obama regime has sought–usually successfully–to entrench and to codify them. This is just the latest example.

Now that’s cynicism we can believe in. It makes you wonder whether what is most extraordinary about Obama’s presidency is just how ordinary his politics have become. I don’t mean to be a hater, but we need to demand more from our political class, and that includes the President. Continue reading →

If there was any doubt whether the U.S. system of government had become a Military Democracy (as opposed to a representative democracy, constitutional monarchy, corporate theocracy), the president has proposed a freeze on discretionary spending. And guess what is non-discretionary?

Regardless, I think that yesterday’s one year anniversary of President Barack H. Obama in office warrants some reflection, especially considering that I was an outspoken Obama supporter during the election. Now, one year later, I think it is safe to say that I got one thing right and one thing very wrong.

What I got right was that Obama’s victory was going to be a blessing in disguise for the Republicans.

But if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t fret too much (unless I was running for reelection tomorrow [Election Day, November 4, 2008]). Remember 1992? Bill Clinton was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. Nevertheless, Bill Clinton was unable to pass any significant legislation. Two years later, the Republican Revolution took control over the Senate and the House for the first time in 40 years, as well as big gains in state legislatures and governorships around the country. That’s right, Americans love divided government. It took a little longer for this to happen to George W. Bush, but the same thing eventually happened to the Republican dominated Congress in the 2006 elections.

What does this mean for Republicans? My guess is that the Democrats will have big congressional victories in state and federal elections tomorrow and if Obama also wins, Americans will once again show their preference for divided government in the 2010 midterm elections. If on the other hand Obama loses, we’ll have divided government with a Republican presidency and Democratic Congress, and no tangible incentive to vote Republicans back into government.

In other words, all Republicans have to do until 2010 is say no to everything coming from the White House, call the president a socialist like its the 1950s, create a legislative stalemate, and voilà, the Republicans will see congressional victories all over the country. But don’t forget that in 1994, President Clinton’s popularity didn’t rise until the Democrats lost their congressional majority and the Republicans thereafter became the fall guys for all of the country’s ills. So in an ironic turn of fait, what is good for Republicans and bad for the Democrats in 2010 – Republicans regaining congressional seats — may be the key to Obama’s reelection in 2012. Americans do love their divided government.

Now to what I got horribly wrong. Back when debating whether Obama’s early choices for cabinet officers would lead to change or was simply recycling the old institutional players, I wishfully argued that unlike Clinton who surrounded himself with his Arkansas boys or Carter who failed as an outsider, Obama was “concentrating not so much on looking like change but on who was most capable of implementing the necessary changes.” Guys like Rahm Emmanuel (who my uncle Charlie had warned me against from day one), Leon Panetta, Geitner, and Summers were supposed to be the insiders who knew how to play ball and get the president’s job done.

But instead of zealously pushing for the president’s mandates, these pro-bowl insiders have done little more than insure the inside status quo. Who would have thought you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks? So instead of real change you can believe in, we have had a full year of more of the same. On almost every initiative and campaign promise of change, President Obama and his team have – quite to the contrary of the Republican cries of socialism – moved far to the right. There has been absolutely nothing progressive or even remotely liberal in any of the Administration’s actions to date. I defy anyone who voted for change — or even those who voted against Obama’s alleged radicalism — to signal a single area where Obama has not caved. Continue reading →

Apparently, many Obama supporters are complaining about the strict scrutiny the President is receiving from the progressive wing of his party. To highlight the cynicism of that position, Greenwald writes,

These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters:  are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid?  Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign?  Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against — from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions?  Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes?  Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN?  Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to “surge” in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam?   Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama’s detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned:  “Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House”?

Who knows?  Who cares?  According to these defenders, it’s just wrong — morally, ethically and psychologically — to criticize the President.  Thus, in lieu of any substantive engagement of these critiques are a slew of moronic Broderian cliches (“If Obama catches heat from the left and right but maintains the middle, he is doing what I hoped he would do (and what he said he would do) when I voted for him”), cringe-inducing proclamations of faith in his greatness (“I am willing to continue to trust his instinct, his grace, his patience and his measured hand”), and emotional contempt for his critics more extreme than one would expect from his own family members.  In other words, the Leave-Obama-Alone protestations posted by Sullivan are fairly representative of the genre.  How far we’ve fallen from the declaration of Thomas Jefferson:  “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

aided by the above video that reveals the shockingly scarce criteria behind Palin worship, almost as if to remind us of the inherent perils in the blind no-questions-asked presidential adoration so common during the W. Bush administration.

One of the reasons why Americans are so indifferent to the U.S. invading other countries is because the wars usually don’t affect us at all. Do you think that all of the Republican war-mongers would be so eager to support the ongoing, ineffectual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq if Americans were actually made to pay for the wars instead of just borrowing the money from abroad? For example, George W. Bush did the unprecedented: he lowered taxes while fighting two wars. Eventually, but not on W.’s watch, both will have to be paid for.

On today’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the round table discussed a completely hypothetical (it is never going to happen) surtax to pay for Afghanistan. Former Bush senior strategist Matthew Dowd (ironically) described the problem perfectly,

I agree there is not going to be a surtax, but I think this goes to a fundamental value that I think we’ve lost, which is that we can get things for nothing, that we can go to war and not have to pay for it, either by cutting the budget or doing something else. We have a war, we don’t have a draft. All of these sorts of things, that we, think, oh, by the way, we can go fight the most important war in the history of our country, but we’re not going to have a draft, we’re not going to pay for it, we’re not going to do anything that causes anybody to sacrifice.

Imagine legislation that required all military interventions to be paid for through taxes. The citizens’ notion of what was and was not in our vital national security interests would change drastically.

I find it increasingly incomprehensible how the hawks panic whenever terrorism crosses paths with the U.S. justice system, as if terrorism will always prevail. Just watch how David Brooks – everyday more of an extremist – views American justice as being incapable of handling terrorists and their propaganda:

I found [Holder’s decision to try the terrorists in court] disturbing, because the terrorists not only get to attack the country and make a global statement that way. Now they’re going to have a public trial to make more statements.

And potential future terrorists will also know that, if caught, they can have a trial, sort of an international reality TV show, to make their statements.

… I mean, what is terrorism? The real targets of a terrorist attack are not the people who are killed. It’s the message that is sent to the country, the act of intimidation. It’s the message of rallying radicals in other parts of the world. And that’s what terrorism is. That’s why terrorism is a unique form of warfare.

This trial will become another act of propaganda. The future trials will become other acts of propaganda. And I think we have to understand that terrorism works through propaganda, not through simply killing. And, therefore, controlling the propaganda effects of an act of terrorism seems to me part of the process we should adapt.

They should have the rights that they’re afforded by the Supreme Court and by the Constitution, but that doesn’t mean we need to provide them with another propaganda opportunity.

Would that mean that any trial whatsoever is potentially incompatible with our justice system? Wouldn’t prosecuting any high profile suspect, according to Brooks’ logic, be considered rewarding the criminal? Do we have that little faith in our Constitution and system of justice?

In his post, “The Right’s textbook ‘surrender to terrorists’: ‘We’re too scared to have real trials in our country’ is a level of cowardice unmatched in the world,” Greenwald notes

People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system.  They didn’t allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice.  Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country’s 2004 train bombings.  The British put those accused of perpetrating the London subway bombings on trial right in their normal courthouse in London.  Indonesia gave public trials using standard court procedures to the individuals who bombed a nightclub in Bali.  India used a Mumbai courtroom to try the sole surviving terrorist who participated in the 2008 massacre of hundreds of residents.  In Argentina, the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes.

It’s only America’s Right that is too scared of the Terrorists — or which exploits the fears of their followers — to insist that no regular trials can be held and that “the safety and security of the American people” mean that we cannot even have them in our country to give them trials.  As usual, it’s the weakest and most frightened among us who rely on the most flamboyant, theatrical displays of “strength” and “courage” to hide what they really are.   Then again, this is the same political movement whose “leaders” — people like John Cornyn and Pat Roberts — cowardly insisted that we must ignore the Constitution in order to stay alive:  the exact antithesis of the core value on which the nation was founded.  Given that, it’s hardly surprising that they exude a level of fear of Terrorists that is unmatched virtually anywhere in the world.  It is, however, noteworthy that the position they advocate — it’s too scary to have normal trials in our country of Terrorists — is as pure a surrender to the Terrorists as it gets.

The real controversy here is whether these are mere show trials. We only try the cases we think we can win, while the rest of the detainees are to be kept in cages indefinitely without trial or anything resembling due process. That is the true test of our resolve to uphold the American Way.

This morning I was listening to veteran New Yorker investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, on NPR’s Fresh Air, and Hersh addressed a leaked story that

President Obama has rejected the options for Afghanistan presented by his national security team, and instead is pushing for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government. This follows leaked classified cables from Americas ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, expressing his misgivings about sending in more troops.

I have been very critical of Obama – even after strongly advocating for his election – for his bold words and tepid actions that have done little more than institutionalize the status quo. Instead of change, we’ve seen more of the same. On the Afghanistan, Guantanamo, torture and use of the military, I have also slammed Obama for thinking strictly in political rather than policy terms – a trait characteristic of Democrats to feign military toughness.

I suppose what has bothered me the most about the Obama presidency is not that Obama has gone back on his campaign promises – that is what all politicians do – but that I know Obama knows better. I think he understands the issues, but is simply too much of a political wimp, a crowd pleaser, to stick to his guns.

Now this leak could be your run-of-the-mill Washington false leak (very Clintonesque) to test the waters. But if true, it would amount to an unprecedented change, real change, in how presidents make decisions on the use of our military. As Hersh explains (and I recommend you read the entire transcript),

Well, assuming that [the leak] is accurate, and it’s very early in the process, this could be an amazing – a really important step for the president, because I can tell you that many in your audience and obviously many here in Washington are very concerned about the fact that he delegated so much of the war-making policy to the generals in the field, asking General McChrystal, for example, to write the initial report on what to do in Afghanistan.

There isn’t a general in the Armed Forces asked to do that would say, I can’t win. That’s just what they do. So he put himself into a box, and he was very passive for a long time about it. And that’s why if you would ask me four days ago what I thought, I would have thought he’s going to make a political decision to do something with some token troops because he wants to he doesn’t want to lose more independence. He wants to show he can run a war. He can be a tough guy.

But what Obama’s done, if he has done what it seems he’s done, is if he’s telling the military, you know what? I don’t think it’s going to fly. This is huge because he’s basically saying I’m not going to play politics with the war. I’m not going to do what other president’s have and continue a war and continue fighting a war that I don’t think we can win – just only for the time, until I can find a way out. That’s what I would have guessed three or four days ago, he was going to do. He was going to wait for the political, right political moment when the public was so discouraged about the war, you could actually end it in some way. Instead, he’s saying, I’m going to stand up and be president, take my chances in 2012 on reelection.

He’s really doing – if he’s doing what’s been reported – a pretty noble thing. The problem is – and this is a daunting problem. The problem is I don’t think there’s any way you can stand up the – the Afghan army. The army traditionally has been controlled by Tajiks and Uzbek, from people from Uzbekistan – you know, from those Northern Alliance, we call them, in Afghanistan.

The Pashtuns who would be controlled by this army, theoretically, under the American dream, there’s no way they’re going to view Uzbeki or they’re going to view them as much of an outsider as they would view the Americans. They simply don’t like others in their face.

On a related note, one thing we hardly hear discussed in the debate on troop escalation is the fact that we simply do not have enough troops. On McChrystal’s proposal for 40,000 more troopos, Hersh says, Continue reading →