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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 3/15/11

Is Obama Even Worse Than Bush?

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This is Bush-Cheney-level secrecy with the pretense that it isn't.  And it's worse.  Obama has set records for rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests and for prosecutions of whistle blowers -- not to mention the lawless imprisonment and torture of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning, a policy Obama has defended by reference to unnamed secret standards set by the military.  Just as Obama escalates wars when and how the military publicly tells him to, he takes responsibility for torturing a prisoner on the military's say-so.  This rhetoric is not just rhetoric.  It threatens civilian rule.

Obama campaigned on the constitutional idea that the legislature makes laws.  He denounced Bush's practice of altering laws with signing statements.  As president, Obama, for a while, used signing statements just as Bush had, to claim more powers for the president (and every future president), including this power to claim more powers.  Then Obama established the practice of assuming that prior signing statements or executive orders or secret legal memos could be used in place of new signing statements.  This is even worse and more secretive than Bush's practice of announcing which laws he would violate.  Obama announced that he would review Bush's signing statements and decide which ones to keep, but not whether those decisions would be public, and with no explanation of how that process was any more constitutional than Bush's.  Obama also began making law, including "law" on lawless imprisonment by executive order.  Congressional Republicans like Buck McKeon want that particular law to be even worse, and so have objected to its imperial announcement.  But they won't push that balance-of-powers fight very far.

Both parties have now established as flawless heroes people who engage in some of the same abuses.  And whoever's next will be hard pressed to even call those abuses abuses, should he or she miraculously want to.  The U.S. Supreme Court accepts powers used without opposition by multiple presidents as established presidential powers.  Signing-statementing laws is now one of those powers.

So is secret and imperial war-making.  John Kerry and John McCain want Libya bombed.  John Yoo, not yet prosecuted for having "legalized" aggressive war, agrees with them.  Obama, to his great credit, has not yet taken that step.  But the debate is over policy choices, not laws.  The fact that bombing another country is illegal is no longer considered a fact in Washington, D.C.  It's a fringe opinion.  And that is what scares me.

So why not impeach Obama?  I clamored for the impeachment of Bush.  I say Obama is as bad or worse.  Why am I such a corrupt hypocrite that I haven't built a movement to impeach Obama?  Well, I'll tell you, as I've told people more times than I can count.  Obama should be impeached and convicted and removed from office.  Obama should be prosecuted for his crimes.  So should his subordinates.  So should his predecessor, his subordinates, and all corporate co-conspirators.  The reason I can't get 20 people into the streets to demand Obama's impeachment (and if I did, they'd want him impeached for being born in Africa to aliens from Planet Socialism) is that nobody in Congress is even pretending to give a damn.  We were able to produce a sizeable movement for impeachment when Bush was in office, because a lot of Democrats in Congress, especially in 2005 and 2006, pretended they were on our side.  I say "pretended" as a way to indicate not that they didn't agree with us, but that they were not committed to trying very hard.

The abolition of slavery started with one person saying it was wrong and demanding change.  We have to do that when it comes to the matter of ending the imperial presidency and establishing a representative republic.  I want anyone who engages in the abuses discussed above impeached, prosecuted, voted out of office, and shamed.  We have to pursue justice for 4 or 8 years with liberals resenting us and 4 or 8 years with rightwingers resenting us, and so on, back and forth.  That means pushing where we spot a little bit of give in the machinery.  It means exposing the torture of Bradley Manning and supporting anything Congressman Dennis Kucinich does to expose it and anything any other congress members do if any ever join him.  It means demanding a complete end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan.  And it means building viable movements of resistance at the state level as Wisconsin is doing.  Join us at the White House at noon on March 19th.  Get involved here:
http://warisacrime.org/content/upcoming-events

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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