I don't think we are in America anymore.

But who cares? We got sex scandals and celebrity deaths to entertain us.

We have worse problems than fascism, war and the absence of law - Michael Bay is still making movies.

...because we traded an illiterate tyrant for a literate one. Are we moving in the right direction?

Thanks again Glenn, for being the most comprehensive and consistent voices on this subject. Integrity is such a lonely word these days.

There was a post and now it is gone. Other than the header, can someone tell me why it was objectionable?

Obama's willingness to say one thing and do, well, almost the exact opposite, is to my mind a more insidious and potentially more dangerous quality than any of Bush's moron-cowboy swagger about "turrists" and how he was a "wartime president."

Naomi Klein was quoted in a New Yorker profile last year saying, about Obama, "He's telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in back rooms he's making deals and signing on to the status quo."

This has been the case with ending the Iraq war, closing Guantanamo and appears to be the pattern already in place for the looming health care debate.

With Bush, the battle lines were fairly clear, and progressives were more or less unequivocal in their opposition to his policies. With his words or by dint of his vaunted personal magnetism, Obama has been able to placate (maybe "de-fang" is more apt) some minority of the progressives who would have fought policies like preventive detention or the massive funding of the Iraq war tooth and nail.

How monstrous is it to stand up and declare, quite literally in front of the U.S. constitution, that you are planning to cut the heart from that document by creating a due process-less system of criminal punishment? Ask your friends. My guess is most people wouldn't even know what you were talking about.

Because it had unsavory truths.

www.whatreallyhappened.com

It's certainly possible -- in fact, I'd say it's likely -- that if Congress passes a preventive detention law, it will be even more Draconian than the one Obama wants. But a President who recognizes Congressional authority only when he likes the outcome -- and ignores it when he doesn't -- isn't a President who actually recognizes Congressional authority at all.

And if that becomes his style then a gutless amoral Congress is likely to jump at the chance of agreeing with him if only in order to be seen to have some input in the governance of America and so speciously justify its own existence.

There is also some nasty omens around. This mysterious civil rights group that is helpfully suggesting how Obama might best incarcerate without trial who are they? Could it possibly be that some new entity purporting to fight for civil rights might come into being diffusing and ultimately destroying the ACLU franchise?

Happens all the time in dictatorships.

There is also the matter of this new type of prisoner status whereby certain prisoners like Muslims and Animal rights people who more and more are being considered as and treated like terrorist subjects are held in something called Communications Management Units. Sounds like a developing way to institutionalise keeping figures considered a threat to the state incommunicado.

Then there is the very seriously bad comment he made in the Cairo speech I think. He said, "There are some people who try and question and justify 9/11."

(I'm doing it from memory so can't be certain whether its "question or/and justfy.")

Either way he was deliberately mixing up a wide, growing and perfectly legitimate group of people with what must be a very small and obscure group of whom I know nothing and who may not even exist.

Can't remember where but recently I read in a print journal a journo saying that people must begin to realise that questioning 9/11 is not a victimless crime. Soon I think they will be trying to make just that an actual crime.

The masses should have been on to this one a lot earlier. Like impeachment being wiped of the table and those who ordered torture going un investigated and un tried, work if not done when it should enables them to carry one eroding the freedoms rights and liberties of a democratic society which is what they were up to all along.

Thomas Jefferson said that trials by jury is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." Why is this painfully obvious principle still necessary to defend after the November election?

These two sentences encapsulate the issue that makes my head spin. I know it's not true for all professionals, but it's certainly true for many of the professionals I've worked with in an array of settings, across a number of disciplines... there are certain core, or first, principles, you don't violate. You just don't do it. That a presumed constitutional law scholar would stand in front of the constitution to deliver a speech so fundamentally antithetical to a core premise of the constitution pretty much sets me back on my heels.

If Obama had studied tax law, or estate law, or contract law maybe I'd be shaking my head, but I wouldn't be quite so gap-jawed. It's like imagining the emergency room medical professionals assisting with the torture of the detainees. Or, clinical psychologists devising the techniques of torture supervised by those medical professionals. It shakes the very core of what I understand as professional ethics. All professional ethical codes I've examined have some provision for reconciling the circumstances where the interests of the professional collide with the interests of other human beings when they act in a professional capacity. If constitutional law scholars have a professional code of ethics, I'd have to imagine Obama in flagrant violation of them.

Sure. There are professionals who skate along the edges. They exist in every profession. There is no little meter that sits on people's shoulders that academic examiners can read to determine whether this professional candidate will uphold their ethical code or not. So, some slimy folks will always slither through. Was Obama one of those folks?

I recognize the tendency for many of Obama's supporters to insert the predicate, Yeah, but.... inherit... George W. Bush... Dick Cheney... extraordinary mess... And, my own Yeah, but... response in return is, So what about all those other professionals who can't, and won't, cross ethical boundaries? Are they just schmucks?

It's clear to me now, if it wasn't clear to me before, that our vetting committees who determine from among what group of political candidates we get to vote, are pretty good at selecting individuals who have no integrity at all. As voters, we may not have been able to determine the content of Obama's character prior to the election (although, for me, FISA was a critical breach), but we sure see it on display now. Bush and Cheney's violation of core constitutional principles was one thing... But, Obama's is in a category all of its own.