Hacker News Reader

Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

Please don't make this about one party or one president. It's not. This kind of behavior goes way, way beyond partisan politics, and to reduce it to that is to abdicate pretty much all of your agency or ability to do anything about it, not least because partisan politics is more about apportioning blame for problems than it is finding solutions to them.

Getting all, "Thanks, Obama!" over what the NSA was up to long before he was elected — if not before Bush was elected — is giving the people who actually did this, and are still doing it, a complete pass.

View on HN

A campaign promise Obama made was to revisit the PATRIOT Act and when it came up for renewal to implement better oversight for NSL's and sneak-and-peak warrants.

The Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2009 without a single modification, despite there being a bi-partizan bill on the floor of congress that looked to implement many more checks and balances, as Obama wanted.

Here is what candidate Obama said in opposition to the FISA extension bill in 2008:

> "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty."

Guess what he did when he became President ..

He also said he would kill warrantless surveillance, but by extending the FISA Act. they changed the warrantless period from 48 hours to a week, at the same time banning states from requesting information and plugging a lot of other loopholes that legal challenges to FISA and warrantless wiretaps could have used in courts.

Obama did a complete 180 on civil liberties (there were other issues as well - Gitmo, habeas corpus for enemy combatants, the coke/crack sentencing disparity, assassinating US citizens with drones etc.) and for some reason seems to enjoy the tough on crime/tough on terrorism stance.

I will continue to say: the President has no power. He is a figurehead to placate the citizenry, he takes his marching orders from higher powers (I don't claim to know who that might be).

Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but look at the reality.

The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant. On a personal basis, Obama is clearly taking part in all this and is an accomplice.

>The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant at all. It's a real pragmatic issue. The president (all of them, I mean) has advisors, pressuring him to do this or that. He has lobbies going for some things. He can be blackmailed or exposed for some peripheral BS (think of Clinton). He has pressure from his party. He might be complicit and make a quick buck (thing of Halliburton and such). In the end, if he's too difficult to work with, he might even be shot (some presidents have. Was it all the work of "madmen"?).

The fact is: the president is the president only after he is elected. And to get to that point, he is vetoed himself so much by the party, lobbyists etc, he has to pass so many "loyalty" tests, he is screened so well in order to get campaign funds and support, that nothing really unpredictable can come out of him against the whole system.

Despite the BS "profile" articles, it's not like any random guy gets elected president. Even if he is a "Chicago community organiser", the above process makes sure he is the RIGHT "Chicago community organiser" -- a tame one, that will satisfy all requirements, and wont affect much change.

Great, so he's an accomplice. I don't think very many people actually dispute that. I certainly don't.

So fucking what?

What does identifying him as an accomplice to the surveillance actually do? Does it make the surveillance somehow magically stop? Does it delete all the data the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other TLAs have about you from their databases? Or does it just serve to stoke your righteous indignation over getting fooled by yet another politician?

When can we stop bickering over whose goddamned fault it is and start, you know, fixing it?

You seem to be doing all of the bickering. Whenever anyone says that they're disappointed and/or angry at Obama for this, you respond by accusing people of being ignorant or lazy.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that not many Obama voters are disappointed in Bush for this, because they didn't think highly of Bush, and never voted for him. In fact, their landslide for Obama seemed primarily a response to policies just like this from his predecessor. Now, they see those confirmed escalated, rather than ended or even slowed. That's a threat to the entire idea of American democracy.

So when are you going to stop bickering about who's fault it's not, and start fixing it?

How can you begin to approach a problem in a representative system if mentioning the names of problematic representatives is considered taboo?

He's not saying it's taboo to name drop. He's saying don't be so naive to play in the hands of a system designed to deflect from taking real action to fix the erosion of civil liberties.

> "He's saying don't be so naive to play in the hands of a system designed to deflect from taking real action to fix the erosion of civil liberties."

Conveniently, he is saying that every time somebody merely mentions a name.

A supermajority vote in Congress nullifies the veto; I'm not sure if any President has ever vetoed a bill following supermajority passage.

As a practical matter, I don't think Obama can take on the Patriot act until after the war in Afghanistan is brought to a close and the AUMF terminated.

You know, it would be nice to have a President that would veto in the face of a supermajority vote when disagreeing with the law. Especially after publicly disagreeing with it.

The reason being is that if the President disagrees with the law and Congress overrides his veto, then the President can state he has nothing to do with the potential negative outcome of the law. If Obama didn't like these laws then he should have manned up and told Congress to own their decision for themselves.

I also seriously doubt the Patriot Act will ever go away without some form of major effort because too many people find it useful for their needs regardless of whether that need has anything to do with terrorism.

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It's a simple fact that the President is the single most powerful individual in the nation. But given that fact, there are still thousands of power relationships that he has to deal with, so he can't just dictate things. Think of the example of a stock-holder with 5% of the stock -- doesn't sound like a lot, but he has the microphone, and the next most powerful person in the room has less than .05% of the stock.

Do you think Ron Paul would have succumbed to the same thing?

No, which is exactly why he is deemed "un-electable".

your a conspiracy theorist...

Go watch his speech from December 15th 2005

That Obama and this Obama are like alternate dark universes.

It's like we are living in the darkest timeline and what we have is evil Abed

The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong".

He also has the power to bring to light any bill that is put on his desk for signature.

Obama grew everything Bush did. The TSA, the NSA, all have become far bigger and more "powerful" under Obama.

I'm not an idiot, I know congress is as much at fault. He is at fault for not fighting it - it's his job as president of this country.

Not to mention the President has substantial executive order powers, that are often very hard to overrule. If the President went to bat for privacy, openly and regularly explained to the US public why, and used his executive order powers to implement changes - well, let the Congress try to overrule that. Obama can then issue 500 executive orders the next morning, slicing the issue into countless separate pieces, let Congress choke on trying to overrule it all, and if they want to stop him at that point, then they can impeach him - and at least Obama would stand on principle, and he'd be the only President impeached for doing the right thing.

Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.

I agree that he probably doesn't want to. That Obama is somehow progressive was a fantasy people clung to because of the trauma of Bush, but Obama didn't even campaign on a progressive platform - at best he fit in the centre, but on many things he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least (by European standards he's still far right, as pretty much every US president, - many of his policies would be hard to defend even for most European conservative parties)

He just looked like a progressive choice against the backdrop of Bush and Cheney and McCain tied to the horror of possibly having Palin represent the lunatic fringe.

BUT, even if he did want to, if he tried to stand firm, everything else would grind to a halt. He'd burn all political capital he's got.

...he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least...

You are misremembering. Before 9/11, domestic spying and the warfare state was primarily part of the left wing platform. Bush was elected on a platform of "humble foreign policy" (as compared to Clinton/Gore's interventionism) and Republicans generally opposed domestic spying.

Only a few years before 9/11, it was paranoid gun toting right wing conspiracy theorists who defended crypto and turing machines, opposed the first patriot act (pushed by Biden and Clinton), and generally opposed the government.

(They dropped this opposition the minute Bush was elected, of course...)

Turing machines? What do they have to do with privacy?

Back in the 90's there was a movement in congress to lock down all computers iPhone style - i.e., ordinary users should not have access to Turing machines. The Clipper Chip was one of the early attempts at this.

The goal was to prevent piracy, encryption, child pornography, violent video games, and all the other bad things that the internet was enabling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Congress can very easily overrule that, by the simple expedient of defunding anything it doesn't approve of. Two current examples:

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303869-house-vot...

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-vot...

I too would sort of prefer that the President function as a benign dictator but Congress can exert much more fine-grained control over the Executive than the Executive can over legislative excess - Clinton actually got Congress to give him a line-item veto but the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional only 2 years later.

Exactly why I voted for him and now feel disappointed. I had the terribly stupid hope that he would bring about real change in his second term given he wouldn't have as much backlash to worry in regards to being reelected.

Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition?

The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong".

'Obama holds America hostage.'

I typed the above as a tongue-in-cheek response to your argument, but then I did a search on it out of curiosity and got >35k results. I sympathize with your point, but as of last summer about 1 in 6 Americans still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Historically, Presidents back into issues rather than planting their feet on them, because political capital is not unlimited.

http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-...

Last time Obama reauthorized the Patriot act (passed by a veto-proof supermajority, incidentally - 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House), Republicans complained about the fact that he used an autopen to sign it remotely:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06...

I don't mean it as a personal attack, but I think your expectations are a little unrealistic.

>Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition?

I like how you said "opposition" rather than "public opposition" because it's what makes the statement true. Fox News will spend all day and all night discussing how Obama is probably a Muslim from Kenya and then "let you draw your own conclusions" regardless of what Obama actually does. That's going to happen whether he does the right thing or not, so why should it stop him from doing the right thing?

I'm really not sure what you're even trying to argue here. It sounds a lot like an argument that because someone somewhere can be found loudly disagreeing with us that we ought to give up. People disagreeing with you is part of democracy. You fight for what you think is right in the court of public opinion and at some point we have an election -- and if the people we elect don't do what we want we get to try it again in the next round, and threaten them with the boot in the meantime. That's what we're doing right now. We're expressing our grievances in public and kicking up our own shitstorm so that more like-minded people will express their views to elected officials and otherwise try to make change.

I'm not talking about Fox News, I'm talking about opposition from within Congress and from the general public. Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route. Congress has persistently declined to allocate funds for housing any Guantanmo prisoners on the mainland, and the way the government operates, Obama can't just appropriate the money from some other part of the budget.

>Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route

There are a lot of people who think that ocean levels aren't rising or who deny evolution. Are we supposed to let the lie win just because a nontrivial number of people have been misled?

And the people in Congress know perfectly well what they're doing. It's not a coincidence that the set of Congressmen who most ardently refuse to close Guantanamo are the same Congressmen who take significant campaign contributions from defense contractors.

And yet people keep voting for them, which is the real problem. You think they're wrong, as do I, but ultimately that's a subjective opinion of ours. You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed. This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.

>You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed.

To some extent you can. Cost benefit analysis, statistics and evidence point against the effectiveness and scale of our existing security posture. Obviously people can ignore all of those things if they please (cue Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"), but at some point you have to find a way to cause the people who are wrong to cease being wrong so that they stop fighting and start helping.

>This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.

That's fine. But I'm sure you know how difficult it is, and how long it takes, to amend the constitution. We can surely approach the problem from other angles in the meantime.

That's not the point.

While we should hold everyone involved - even peripherally - responsible, it's not appropriate or productive to compare Obama to Bush.

We need to frame the objection as, "This is wrong!" not, "This is worse than/just like $OTHER_PERSON." It's implicitly partisan.

It's perfectly appropriate to compare them, as there is no longer anything left to contrast between the two.

Appropriate? Maybe. Productive? Not really.

If, no matter who we "elect", we get the same policies, then I do think it's productive to highlight this via comparing and contrasting the parties/representatives.

This shows very strong common threads running through two parties which are presented to us as drastically different. That, in turn, exposes the fact that there is another "power" that completely supercedes our democratic process and the very notion that we actually have a representative form of government.

Now, what we do with that information is another story. Talk raises awareness, but it's not enough to just talk about it. There needs to be a viable third party and protests aimed solely and specifically at reform such as removing the money from politics, term limits, closing the revolving door between industry and government, etc.

Obama was elected on a promise to stop this bullshit. That promise was a lie.

For all his faults, George W. Bush never campaigned as a civil libertarian.

Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state?

Or does it just make him a liar?

Look, my point is this: as long as we waste our time bickering over whose fucking fault this mess is, no-one is doing a damned thing to fix it. I'd rather people spend their time and energy on the latter. If you think finger-pointing is a better use of yours, more power to you, and have fun with that.

> Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state?

Actually, yes. Because back when people were angry enough about the issue, they focused all that anger on Bush. Then comes Obama and all that energy gets transformed into support for him because people honestly believed that he was different, that he was against ever-expanding warfare abroad and ever-shrinking civil liberties at home. And when he won in 2008, the people of this country, who were outraged at everything Bush had done, got their satisfaction.

There was vast public sentiment against this kind of thing. Obama subverted it and destroyed it.

He was actually given the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush - 100% subversion. I think it's not unfair to say that he's harmed American democracy more than Bush could have, by legitimizing every harmful thing Bush did.

Can the committee giving out that prize revoke it? And if so, have they ever done so in the past and under what pretenses?

They never revoked the ones they gave to Kissinger or Arafat. It's a bit of a sham to be honest.

Yes. With Bush you know what you get. He's transparent like clear water and you know the policies he wants to push for.

Obama passes for an idealist but actually acts like a Bush in disguise. That's way more despicable. That's called deceit and fraud.

It makes him more of a liar through his inconsistency of ethics.

I think it shows that his ethics are perfectly consistent — with those of the standard-issue American politician: promise whatever will get you elected.

The anger people are feeling comes from their having been duped, yet again, by yet another of these creatures.

The fact that he talked such a good game, was given such a golden opportunity to talk that game, and inspired so much hope — going so far as to make the word a centerpiece of his campaign — just made it that much worse when those hopes were dashed, even flouted, so completely.

Welcome to American politics. You can hate the player, or you can hate the game.

This is a pretty big topic, so I'll just offer this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29

Yes, you can say his ethics (such as they are) are consistent, but it's a weak form of ethics that do not govern one's actions.

Well the first step to fixing it is to throw Obama out of office (that starts with finger pointing). That would be the single most powerful statement that the US public could make. We will tear down any leader or administration who acts this way.

That assumes you have an electable replacement in mind that will not cause worse problems.

No, because "electable" may as well be shorthand for "will behave in the same fashion as the last two puppet stooges"

End the game, not the players.

Change the game, sure.

End the game? No. Revolutions usually wind up with a much worse game as a result.

Consider if the world had never had a revolution the current state we would be in.

I don't buy that's a better picture.

In most cases, revolution was dynamite that blew up the old regime, and had little bearing on creating a desirable society and regime to take its place. In most of Europe this happened through centuries of political reform.

We like to romanticize the few revolutions that had positive outcomes (America), but also downplay the utterly disastrous consequences of others (France).

We also like to ignore that today's terrorists are often what we used to call revolutionaries. (Was 9/11 was not Act 1 in a revolution in US governance?)

My point is that violence exists, and revolutions happen. But they exist to destroy, not to create. Annoying, compromising, good old politics haVe to clean up the mess and replace it with something better. That's rare.

This isn't really true. Bush certainly campaigned as being opposed to the excesses of Clinton/Gore. Among other things, Bush chose Ashcroft as his AG to demonstrate his support for civil liberties.

(In spite of his contemporary reputation, Ashcroft was proponent of civil liberties. He ruled that Stellar Wind was illegal (leading to Bush firing him), fought in the senate for encryption and turing machines, opposed racial profiling and protecting 2nd amendment rights.)

I don't know what this comment is replying to. The parent seemed to blame Bush, Obama, and hypothetical future administrations.

The desperation to completely absolve Obama based on claims of his office's powerlessness, Congress, or Bush is bizarre. It's also Greenwald's primary political critique, (not) coincidentally.

Obama has been involved with this from the first day of his presidency until today, it's in his branch, he fought for immunity for telcos and reauthorized PATRIOT. If he had absolutely no ability to effect it, we should just stop having elections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com