::::::::
What progressive value does this article champion?
Let's consolidate the unitary executive for OUR gang-banger? Rob, you understand impeachment better than most and have committed a lot of your time and effort and some money to it. But you have always equivocated. You have always said you'd accept the lesser of two evils. That you'd take whatever Democrat was nominated over whatever Republican. That, I respectfully (because you have been a decent guy and a diligent citizen) submit, is exactly the problem with American progressives. You are Americans looking to your priviledges first, and to your human values second. I don't know how it is that with your understanding of the difficulties of getting impeachment through first the house and then the trial in the senate you can imagine that the Republicans would succeed in impeaching Obama if he did not deserve impeachment. Rob the problem with lesser evil thinking is that it always encourages us to surrender and to retreat. Sooner or later there is nowhere left to retreat or to surrender too.
To be a true human progressive we need to have hierarchies of values. If there is no universal human value that you won't ultimately stand for and no negotiate away then you aren't a progressive. This is not meant to be an attack it is matter of logic.
In tough times, in concentration camps, the choice can come down to rush the fence and almost certainly die, or appease the tyrants and live. Some appease the tyrants even to the extent of working for them. They turn on their own. They give up the plotters who would try to organise a joint rushing of the fence.
American progressives are becoming like that. You claim to be against torture and pro the rule of law and I think that you genuinely are so long as those values do not cost you too much.
You really are going to have to choose or be seen to have failed to choose. You know that you can, that it is within your power to go to Obama before the election and to seek a commitment from him NOT to use the Presidential pardon power to pardon war criminals, you also know that Obama will not want the baggage of that committment and the publicising of that commitment whilst he is trying to get elected. But without getting that commitment from Obama you are not doing your due diligence as a progressive that wants a world in which Presidents do not order torture and do not order aggressive invasions.
If your read your article not as an American but as a human being what universal human values does it champion?
