Hypocrites silent as Obama authorizes military detention of American citizens
January 2, 2012 – 2:23 pm by JohnOne of the most unfortunate aspects of America’s democratic process and its current state here at the beginning of 2012 is the nearly compete absence of discussion of some central issues by most people, along with their failure to acknowledge that those issues even exist and their complete hypocrisy regarding those issues and the candidates they vote for. This was obvious in 2001 when the Patriot Act was signed into law by a supposedly small-government conservative (cheered on by millions of self-described small-government conservatives) and throughout the Bush and Obama regimes as various provisions of the Patriot Act were reauthorized and extended. Now the self-righteous denial, avoidance, bias, and hypocrisy of liberal Democrats have become as obvious and pronounced as ever as Obama signs the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012, which basically authorizes the president to order the detention of any American citizen without charge or trial in the interest of waging the War on Terror.
The ACLU says of this signing,
While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.
“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”
[emphasis in original]
These thoughts about the pathetic state of American political discourse, especially on television (but also, in my experience, within my circle of friends, mainly Facebook), were inspired by Glenn Greenwald’s absolutely masterful (as always) tirade against the vast majority of liberals and Obama supporters for their constant hypocrisy and total evasion of any acknowledgment of his failings. The essay is mostly about Ron Paul, whose every interview, appearance, press release, and sound bite do address those civil-liberties and foreign-policy issues and do criticize the supposedly “progressive” Obama for being such an abject failure on every civil-liberties issue in every possible way. Greenwald writes,
But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.
[...]
Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?) or grievance (you’re helping Mitt Romney by talking about this!!). The premise takes hold for a full 18 months — increasing each day in intensity until Election Day — that every discussion of the President’s actions must be driven solely by one’s preference for election outcomes (if you support the President’s re-election, then why criticize him?).
Greenwald wrote this and more to preface his positive thoughts about the candidacy of Ron Paul, who is the only Republican or Democratic presidential candidate to firmly oppose the aggressive foreign policy and civil liberties trampling that Obama has implemented, that every other Republican candidate agrees with or worse, and that liberal Democrats ignore when discussing, thinking about, and voting in elections.
Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.
As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.
The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.
The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
[emphasis in original]
Perhaps one of my many failings as a purported political commentator is that I don’t regularly read any liberal blaggers or websites except Greenwald, and him not often enough (which would be every word). Therefore, I can’t judge how few liberal Democrats really acknowledge and criticize all of these heinous actions of Obama’s—one example that I’ve saved is a column by the liberal law professor and staunch civil libertarian Jonathan Turley titled “President Obama has been a disaster for civil liberties” in the mostly liberal Los Angeles Times—but I am mainly frustrated and actually quite a bit disgusted with my hypocritical, smug, liberal, Obama-supporting friends and acquaintances who share links on Facebook about this or that awful thing a Republican(s) has done or said, join in the circle-jerk with the ‘Like’ button and their comments with nary a word of dissent, ridicule Republicans at every opportunity as if they are all a single fetid mass of benighted, hateful, racist, jingoist primitivism that only exists to prevent Democrats from delivering us to Utopia, and never mention a single objectionable thing any Democrat has ever done or said.
Some recent Facebook posts from my friends include a link to the article Speaker Cuts Off C-SPAN Cameras When Dems Attempt To Bring Vote On Payroll Tax Cut with a snarky comment, an admonishment of the United States that if we only paid more taxes, we would have better health care and infrastructure like the country that person is currently visiting, and at least a half-dozen articles about why the envy-based wealth-redistribution politics of the Occupy movement are noble and desirable. None of those people has ever written or linked to a single thing critical of Obama, his regime’s relentless assault on our civil liberties, his regime’s total obsession with secrecy despite promises of transparency, his continuation and escalation of the murder of innocent civilians in Asia, the fact that Obama is obviously bought and paid for by Wall Street banksters as much as any Republican, or any other Democratic failing or hypocrisy. Where are the Facebook posts about SOPA, which Democrats are equally as responsible for as Republicans? Where are the Facebook posts about Obama’s signing of this year’s NDAA with its flagrant disregard for half of the Bill of Rights? Plenty of neutral and left-leaning sites have published articles and columns critical of these bills, and you have seen them! You are part of the problem, you stupid self-blinding morans! You are party to the murders, the imprisonments, the rights violations, the cronyist favoritism, the wealth destruction that the politicians you elected and will re-elect have inflicted and will continue to inflict upon millions of victims!
I try not to judge them for their political beliefs, but it’s hard. They define themselves so much by their total adoration of Obama and the Democratic Party and base so much of their social lives (especially online, which is the only way I currently interact with some of them) on deifying the Democrats and vilifying Republicans that I can’t help but conclude that their systematic bias, their selectively targeted vitriol, and their continuous self-deception are pretty important parts of their character and their personalities. I don’t talk about politics with my friends or write about it anywhere other than here because no one likes trying to parse radical libertarian philosophy that challenges basically every political thought they have ever had and because I don’t like stressful discussions or arguments, especially ones that will alienate me from others who all think alike. It’s true that people who would judge me for my libertarianism are not worth having as friends, but it’s also true that it’s nearly impossible to completely avoid judging others for their politics even though you know their politics rarely say anything bad about their character. Case in point: this very post, in which I judge my friends and colleagues as hypocritical enablers of totalitarian fascism from the anonymity of my blagging chair. I want to keep my friends, and I have made a conscious effort as I’ve gotten older to judge people as people only on the basis of whether they mean well, which my friends all do. This is especially true in discussions/arguments on the internet with anonymous strangers, when courtesy and respect are all too rare.
However, regardless of their intentions, the consequences of their silence about Democratic failings, especially Obama’s, cannot be ignored. There is no better example of the Red-vs.-Blue, with-us-or-against-us, the-right-politicians-will-solve-everything mentality than the average American Democratic voter. Perhaps the average American Republican voter could only equal the loyal Democrat’s ignorance, self-denial, bias, and crippling hypocrisy. What these failings are going to get us are another murderous, oppressive, secretive Obama term, more Democratic legislators who are too morally bankrupt and cowardly to stand up to the neocons for our basic Constitutional rights, and more silence on the uncomfortable truth about the state of American liberalism.
