Hypocrisy
Wednesday 20 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
This, folks, is what is known to moral human beings as hypocrisy. Glenn Greenwald:
Literally moments after he was inaugurated, the White House declared that “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history”. Obama continues even now to parade around as a historically unprecedented champion of openness. In a 2010 speech, he said “I will not stop fighting to open up government” and then praised himself this way: “we have put in place the toughest transparency rules in history: in history.” Right this very minute, on the White House website, Obama is quoted this way: “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government” because “transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”
[. . .]
Along with others, I’ve spent the last four years documenting the extreme, often unprecedented, commitment to secrecy that this president has exhibited, including his vindictive war on whistleblowers, his refusal to disclose even the legal principles underpinning his claimed war powers of assassination, and his unrelenting, Bush-copying invocation of secrecy privileges to prevent courts even from deciding the legality of his conduct (as a 2009 headline on the Obama-friendly TPM site put it: “Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets”). Just this week, the Associated Press conducted a study proving that last year, the Obama administration has rejected more FOIA requests on national security grounds than in any year since Obama became president[.]
[. . .]
To justify his conduct, Obama “tried to assure his former colleagues that his administration is more open to oversight than that of President George W. Bush”, saying: “This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here.” This excuse Obama used – I used to object to these things when I was a Senator but see it differently now that I’m president – is one that is frequently heard from his followers, but more important, is what Bush supporters always said would happen once a Democrat became president: that, with the secret information you get in the Oval Office and the need to Keep Us Safe™, a Democratic president would realize that Bush and Cheney were right all along about many of the policies which Democrats spent eight years so harshly denouncing. Given that Obama himself is now expressly saying this (“he noted his viewpoint changed now that he occupies the Oval Office”), doesn’t he and his party – as I’ve asked many times before – owe a heartfelt and sincere public apology to Bush and Cheney for bashing them so harshly for policies which Obama now not only adopts but has come to explicitly defend?
I wouldn’t expect an apology anytime soon. That would be bad politics (even though bad politics often correlates with doing what is right). Obama could certainly never publicly admit that he thinks Bush was right. THat will never happen, but then again it’s not the point.
What is the point, however, is that he would have us believe that I’m supposed to trust horrible policy in his hands, but not in the hands of one of those evil Republicans. He wants me to believe in the rule of man, not the rule of law. And he is full of shit. Bush wasn’t the one who claimed and exercised the powers to kill American citizens without a shred of due process.
Our entire system of government was set up as a reaction to one man rule. It’s why we had a revolution and set up a Constitution which had built-in checks and balances with multiple branches of government: so that one man could NOT make life and death decisions regarding our citizens. Yet he flaunts it with a wink and a “trust me” after he attains power, and after he spent years denouncing such powers when someone else had them.
It’s nothing but simple hypocrisy.
2013-03-20 » madlibertarianguy