- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Joe Conason
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Bush blew it by getting into the game. He threw plausible deniabiliy out the window and went from a co-conspiritor in crime to an out-and-out criminal. Obama seems happy to go back to the co-conspirator mode and make pius speeches he knows are windowdressing for the continuation of Bush policies.
Let's face it, folks--Obama has the air of a man who holds those who stand by the Constitutional order in bemused contempt, so long as we don't cross him; when we do he will denounce us, as he did in this speech, holding us as the equivalents of the "anything goes" crowd on the margins as "extremists". While, I'm sure, SERIOUS journalists just want the president to have the power to secretly break the law (i.e. torture, kill, and preventatively detain human beings) so they won't have to go through the bother of covering it up or arguing that it isn't so bad. Well, if the President believes that those who take for granted that all men and women have inalienable rights are extremist, then the President can go fuck himself.
