As many of us expected, President Obama’s decision to block any investigation or prosecution of war crimes has led Republicans to rehabilitate George Bush’s legacy. The latest claim came from former Vice President Dick Cheney who previously boasted about the torture program in public — unconcerned about any prosecution from Attorney General Eric Holder. Now, Cheney is boasting that Obama has “learned from experience” that some of the Bush administration’s decisions on terrorism issues.
Cheney stated “I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate. So I think he’s learned from experience. And part of that experience was the Democrats having a terrible showing last election.” He added “I think he’s learned that he’s not going to be able to close Guantanamo . . . That it’s — if you didn’t have it, you’d have to create one like that. You’ve got to have some place to put terrorists who are combatants who are bound and determined to try to kill Americans.”
Obama opened himself up to his unwanted alliance when he decided to protect Bush officials from prosecution despite the obligation of his Administration under existing treaties to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. Just last week, a senior former Justice official denounced the Administration for its complicity and said that it would leave a lasting stain on the country.
Cheney also called Obama a one-term president. If so, Obama has earned both Cheney recommendation and his loss of a second term. As promising the Senate that he would not continue his political conduct from the Clinton years at Justice, Holder proceeded to make the ultimate political act by blocking prosecutions after Obama promised that CIA officials would never be prosecuted for the alleged war crimes. It was the triumph of politics over principle — even war crimes principles were not enough to risk alienating the right. Politics should not have been part of the equation, but it also proved to be a remarkably illogical choice since the right never warmed to Obama despite a series of compromises from the White House. The result is that Obama is both unpopular and unprincipled in this area.
Source: The Hill
Jonathan Turley
rafflaw,
I am reading your posts and you are not answering my question. I don’t care who the Republicans are nominating. How can you even think of supporting a person who tortures, has decided he can kill American citizens, engages in illegal wars, etc. How can you support that person?
Jill,
you must not read my posts very well. I have gone after Obama on many occasions and I will continue to hold his feet and the administration’s feet to the fire. The difference is he will do somethings that are good for the middle class which the current Republicans wouldn’t even consider. I wish he would be more progressive on health care and other issues, but he is a lot closer to what I think is important than any Teapublican around. I am not suggesting that their might not be a better progressive candidate out there that I would support over Obama, but the Teapublicans certaintily haven’t shown one yet.
S.M.,
I notice that you will never openly confront most direct questions posed to you. Let me still “defend” (at least in your mind) the tea party. Everyone in the tea party is not evil–OMG what a horrifying thought! Strangely, it is a thought shared by known right wingers such as Chomsky and Nader!!! Also, I would appreciate you stopping to connect me with tootie. This is a technique to discredit me. I have already distanced myself from tootie with whom I hold nothing in common.
Blouise,
I’m asking you the same question I asked the others. Obama tortures, he is conducting multiple illegal wars, using drones, upping the police state, working with corporations against the people, etc.. At that point, why would you vote for him?
Swarthmore mom
1, January 19, 2011 at 12:32 pm
buddha: That is why for now I am staying with Obama as unpopular as the choice may be on here.
====================================================
That is a reasonable and realistic decision … given the alternative choices thus far presented.
I remember that you were one of the least enamored with the Obama nomination. Not having fallen madly in love with the idea of him, you are less disappointed in the reality you always knew he was.
Being a firm Pelosi supporter … I feel your pain … we’ll sit at the second tier lunch table together 🙂
Jill: I speak out against Obama and always have. Just ask my family. There is no need to do that on here as tootie and you have that more than covered. I have noticed that you have quit defending the tea party since the assassination attempt in Tuscon. Have to go.
rafflaw,
You used to excoriate bush for his wars, torture, police state tactics etc. Obama is doing all this and more. Why on earth would you even consider voting for him? Do you oppose these things or not? If you do, then fight them being institutionalized by Obama. It can’t be that it’s terrible if a Republican does these things, but O.K. when a Democrat does them. Tell me how you can change your mind about right and wrong based on party affiliation?
S.M.,
Why are you so worried about a future candidate while you will not protest or speak out against the wrongdoing of your own candidate? You are a Democrat. The Democratic party is supposed to hold certain sets of values. Make them hold them. Otherwise, you are saying any Democratic candidate may do anything because they at least aren’t a Republican. Where is your scathing voice about war, torture, the surveillance state, the police state, the economy, the gutting of environmental protections? These things are happening right now, under a Democratic president.
This is exactly what Republicans did under Bush. They remained his loyal followers, campaigners, talking pointers, all of it. Very few of them stood up to Bush and said, you have no business being in the White House. We won’t tolerate your lawless, immoral actions or your illegal power grab. Yes, that turned out well for our nation. Now it’s Democrats. You should be screaming, withholding all funds, all campaigning, never once justifying illegalities. But you and many other Democrats do all this and more.
You spend so much time worrying about who the Republicans will chose in the 2012 election but that’s too late. Do you think climate change is waiting for the next presidential election? Do you think people who are losing their jobs, their homes, their healthcare are magically going to be fine between now and 2012? Do you think the rampant spying and police tactics won’t be getting worse until after 2012? Do you think more troops, more drones won’t be sent all over the world before 2012? Think again. It doesn’t mean anything to be a Democrat if you don’t oppose things that are wrong.
And that’s your prerogative, Smom. He had his chance and he blew it. I won’t vote for him again. Which is my prerogative.
Not after his assassination proclamation and his sucking up to the same old corporatist interests.
If my choices are the blatantly insane or the blatantly unconstitutional aiders and abettor of treason?
I’ll write in before I chose either of those non-options or I won’t vote at all.
The pols can burn this country to the ground in their myopic greed and narcissistic selfishness, but they can do it without my assistance or approval.
Swarthmore Mom,
amen to why Obama is still the best choice. I would prefer someone like Kucinich, but I just don’t see that happening.
buddha: That is why for now I am staying with Obama as unpopular as the choice may be on here.
Smom,
My.
That’s some choice.
Do we get fried, er, fires, um, fries with that combo meal?
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/dick-cheney-im-intrigued-by-mitch-daniels-for-president-video.php?ref=fpi Daniels is Cheney’s candidate. Two candidates will emerge from the republican primaries. One will be a christian fundamentalist and the other will be a candidate that wants to expand the wars and is 100% corporate Rove backed.
RE: Tootie, January 18, 2011 at 10:57 pm
BIL:
If I lacked the capacity to make you hysterical you would not continually attack me. You attack me because you cannot control yourself.
You become unhinged and I bring out the worst in you.
I control you and you don’t realize it.
###########
If I want to study a Marinette, I can “fire up” my 2-meter-band amateur rig, tune it to 147.000 megahertz, with a 107.2 Hertz PL tone, call CQ, and begin talking to whoever, if anyone, in Marinette, Wisconsin, comes back to me. Marinette is worth studying, the recent school incident there ended without horrible violence and death.
I prefer to not study a Marionette, once I have learned how to avoid such studying. I do not pull the strings, nor would I regard myself as being competent to do so.
There are sand bars, local bars in Door County which I frequent not, bars to equal treatment under law, and finally, The Bar itself. I would much rather run aground on a sand bar than run aground before The Bar.
Run aground on a sand bar? Out in our shed, in storage, is 23.5 foot fiberglass inboard sloop, a Bock Privateer, with a Universal Atomic Four gasoline engine, and a fixed iron keel. It is wise to avoid running such a sailboat into a sand bar.
While my brother was dying from cancer and I was entrained in my first voluntary inpatient psychiatric hospital field research encounter, my brother brought that sailboat from its mooring in Jackson Park Harbor, in Chicago, to a boat yard, and covered it.
He overlooked fully draining the drinking water tank on the boat, the water line to the galley froze, water got into some places where freezing water damages such a hull, and, though I inherited the boat, have never had the formidable funds needed to properly repair the hull.
I was barred from working with my brother in winterizing the Bock Privateer in the late fall of 1987 because I had entered the 8-East Psychiatric Unit of the University of Illinois Hospital voluntarily, and, having voluntarily entered, was effectively barred from voluntarily getting a pass to work with my brother on our sailboat for what would have been the very last time before he died.
In January of 1987, my brother sailed off to freedom from the trials and tribulations of this world as I sailed into the violence of the storm of human hateful destruction.
As for sailing, I have been long aware of the possible dangers of sailing into a bar, whether a sand bar, a bar that serves alcoholic drinks, or The Bar.
I did not sail into The Bar, it recklessly ran into me, doing so totally against my will and consent, and in absolutely stark violation of my conscience.
When I find the control bar of a Marionette has somehow come into my grasp, I work at releasing it as decently as I am able. Alas, not being proficient in operating a Marionette, I am yet very clumsy and inadept.
For this, I am very sorry, yet I cannot know what I have not yet been truthfully given to learn, and I cannot understand what I have not yet been truthfully given to understand.
Unwittingly manipulating the control bars of a Marionette of the Bar is a very scary experience for me, almost as scary as being forced against my will and conscience before The Bar.
Alas, in my very early childhood, I learned that to forgive is to remember, and to especially remember forgiving and forgiveness. It is this, I surmise, that bars me from being as I find a vast majority of people seem to me to be.
Even so, I really enjoy, as recreation, a really good Marionette show, so long as the Marionettes, puppeteer, and audience are not damaged in, by, or during the show.
On the plus side politically, apparently LIEberman is not going to run for office again.
I guess he’s done all the damage to the American people he was paid to do by industry.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41142447/ns/politics-capitol_hill/
If Dennis Kucinich is to be our choice for 2012, I wait with bated breath for his introduction of a bill to impeach President Obama. Any news there yet? Doesn’t he know Obama is still torturing prisoners and refusing to prosecute Bush and Cheney?
This is really interesting. Now we have allegations that President Obama is complicit in cutting social security and wrecking the environment. Really? Is the source for this better than the (so far secret) source about the Obama Adminstration regularly torturing prisoners?
Tootles,
“It is LOGICAL to assume he did have a unique genetic material, but it is not provable.”
Only if you believe an unprovable: namely that Jesus was the literal son of God. And you know the old truism about assumptions. Logic is faulty logic when it is founded upon a belief and not an empirical fact.
Here is a list of the logical fallacies you’ve committed:
argumentum ad verecundiam – an appeal to authority; in your case, the Bible. There is a problem with appealing to a book like that – i.e. a book of second hand tales designed and utilized – until the recent madness that is Fundamentalism – as parables. The Bible is not literally true therefor it cannot be an authority on historical claims let alone scientific claims like “Jesus had unique DNA”. The Bible is a collection of second hand tales that are not evidence of anything other than being re-told tales designed to teach lessons about behavior that was acceptable in the Iron Age. For example, there is plenty of scientific evidence that the Book of Genesis is simply a retelling of the Sumerian story The Eridu Genesis – which was found on a clay tablet tablet excavated in Nippur and carbon dated to the 17th Century BCE, long before your little collection of fairy tales was written let alone complied by editors. Editors, who by the nature of being editors, exercised human control over the content of the New Testament. Consequently you’ve committed . . .
argumentum ad ignorantiam – An appeal to ignorance. Just because something has not been proven false does not mean it is necessarily true. You made the claim as a positive assertion; a truth. Yet you have no proof of that assertion. But now, suddenly, with your claim unprovable, you switch to “I never said it was provable and I never said it was a fact.” Despite asserting it as a true statement; a fact. Contradict yourself much? Come on and dance for us, church monkey!
Both of those errors are forms of irrelevant conclusion, i.e. they are useful only if one wants to draw attention away from from a dispute rather than address it. In this instance, you are drawing away from the disputed claim that Jesus had “special” DNA because his daddy was allegedly the Big Invisible Sky Daddy. This does not change that they are logical fallacies and, ergo, errors in your thought process. Which leads to . . .
petitio principii – also known as begging the question or circular logic. You’ve assumed the Bible is the literal truth despite mounds of archeological evidence it is not and the long standing teaching traditions of both Judaism and non-Fundamentalist Christianity that it is not literal but rather a book of parables, i.e. stories designed to teach a lesson – not the literal truth.
Parables are in and of themselves problematic. As a story designed to teach a lesson, a lot of control rests in the hands of the teller – including the ability to distort the original lesson. This is part and parcel of why the Bible (and every other religious text that relies upon parables) have been used to justify all kinds of evil over the eons. But I digress.
And last but not least . . .
argumentum verbosium – Once again, just because you are spreading more bullshit by quantity than you have previously, it doesn’t make it quality bullshit or even a good argument. So far, you haven’t said anything you haven’t said before with greater brevity.
Your argument and your logic are insufficient to back your claims.
And speaking of committed, you are what is known as “delusional”. And not just about the Bible being literally true or Jesus having Big Sky Daddy DNA either. That word you keep using “control”? You should really get some over the false impression you have any over me. No one here controls me. Ask most any of the regulars or even the Prof. It’s one topic they will agree upon – I’m uncontrollable. It’s rooted in my total skepticism and general disrespect of “authority”.
In case you haven’t noticed, I do let a lot of your nonsense slide, Tootles. Others like to debunk you too, so why should I have all the fun? Here’s how this works: You spout nonsense. I destroy nonsense when and only when I feel like it. Lately, I’ve felt like it. Why?
Pure caprice on my part. You could get lucky. I may go back to ignoring you at any moment. Or maybe not. You just can’t tell.
It’s like winning the lottery.
I would appear that as well as continuing the Bush/Cheney policies regarding the unitary Executive, the policy the Admistration is firm in continuing is the policy that victims allegations of torture and abuse will never see the light of day.
“Court Rules Government Can Continue To Suppress Detainee Statements Describing Torture And Abuse
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2689 or 2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court today ruled that the government can continue suppressing transcripts in which former CIA prisoners now held at Guantánamo Bay describe abuse and torture they suffered in CIA custody. The ruling came in an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to obtain uncensored transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) used to determine if Guantánamo detainees qualify as “enemy combatants.” …
in October 2009 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the government’s motion to dismiss the case without even reviewing the documents in question in order to determine if they were properly withheld. Today’s appellate court ruling allows the government to continue withholding the documents.
“The notion that the CIA can classify torture victims’ descriptions of their own first-hand experiences is dangerous and far-reaching,” said Wizner. “No court has ever held that unconfirmed allegations offered by detainees concerning the treatment to which they themselves were subjected could be classified and suppressed.” ”
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/court-rules-government-can-continue-suppress-detainee-statements-describing-tort-0
Or are you a monkey’s uncle? Or cousin? (not sure how this works, I’m new at it)
Heh.
BIL:
I don’t need to prove Jesus had a completely unique DNA. I’m not asking anyone to believe it. I never said it was provable and I never said it was a fact. It is LOGICAL to assume he did have a unique genetic material, but it is not provable.
I can, of course, speculate about it. Which is what I am doing but drew your ire because I, apparently, neglected to ask your permission.
I’m sure all of this is difficult for a person of your limited ability to figure out. That’s okay. It is of no consequence to the world when you cannot figure out simple things. No one will notice.
You write:
“I attack you because you’re full of crap…So pardon me while I laugh my ass off once again at your ignorance and severe overestimation of yourself.”
It appears you are the one who overestimates yourself as anyone so deeply interested in crap and thinks himself more superior to me has surely thought a tad too much about himself.
Your deep interest in crap could indicate that you haven’t moved all that far along the evolutionary path, so-to-speak. And like your kin the Gorilla, you appear to have a thing for crap. Perhaps you can learn something from your brothers the apes?
They eat it.
Yes, now I see the resemblance. You’ve convinced me about evolution. I now have faith that you do resemble the lower primates.
I’m a believer!