Is the problem that Obama does not know patriotism when he sees it? It isn't Snowden that is accused of violating the oath to support the Constitution that he swore when joining the military and the CIA. Obama is the one wrapping his arms around acts that many Americans justifiably consider to be fundamental violations of the Constitution and to advance the essential practice of a totalitarian police state that the Constitution is designed to prevent.
Obama may have some other private definition of what makes a patriot. But you cannot love the country if you do not above all love and support the Constitution that created it and defines it. Without the Constitution the USA is just a failed experiment. If Obama wants to apply another test, then Obama needs to amend the Constitution to change the oaths that apply to him, as well as to the military and all other state and federal executive, legislative and judicial officers. The oath has not changed since Nixon was impeached for "violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and " [being] repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens."
Obama does not even try to suggest what other motivation Snowden could have. For many people it is Obama's own patriotism, his fidelity to the Constitution, let alone truth, that is far more credibly in question than Snowden's.
That leads to the defensive portion of Obama's August 9 performance. Obama announced that "at my direction the Department of Justice will make public the legal rationale for the government's collection activities." This unsigned and unsourced Administration White Paper document is embraced by Obama as his legal defense against the evidence provided by Snowden's revelations that Obama has blatantly violated the Fourth Amendment. The White Paper's long-term secret status is understandable because it does not present a strong legal defense, and it does not even have a John Yoo willing to commit professional suicide by putting his name on it. Its arguments are predictably weak, as explained by this author in a previous article , because Obama's case is weak. That is why Obama adopts the Vince Lombardi tactic: "The best defense is a good offense," known in propagandist discourse as the "attack the messenger ploy."
The Oaths
Obama should remember his oath of office, having recited it almost three times. But in the offensive portion of his August 9 performance Obama starts out by spinning his way out of that oath, misstating the paramount responsibility it imposes on him. Obama redraws constitutional priorities by defining "[his] number one responsibility as commander in chief, and that's keeping the American people safe."
There is no separate constitutional oath for the office of "commander in chief." The first and transcendent responsibility to which Obama is sworn, both as president and in his subsidiary role as "commander in chief," other than generally carrying out his presidential duties, is: "to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Art. II, Sec. 1, Cl 8. This is in addition to the lesser oath that Snowden and Manning also took to "support this Constitution." Art. VI (3). The Constitution is not just an abstraction like the flag that can be ascribed subjective content. It is the playbook for maintaining democracy, or a "republic" as it was called at that time.
Safety from terrorism is the threat that Obama prioritizes over his oath of office, since the Commander avoids any mention of, and is certainly holding no press conferences on, his unpopular, uselessly escalated, war in Afghanistan that has killed 1,629 Americans on his watch . If there is an acceptable definition of terrorism, it is "criminal acts calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public," i.e., a tactic limited to violence against soft civilian targets. By definition, then, those who would use the tactic of terrorism against civilians, as distinct from the tactic of regular or irregular warfare against governments, cannot themselves inflict any damage on the Constitution, any more than other private localized crimes of violence can threaten the Constitution. Only fear of terrorism could do that. So, defending against the crimes of terrorism is simply irrelevant to the president's paramount obligation to defend the Constitution, unless it is used, as Obama does, to justify fearful undermining of the Constitution. To apply FDR's precept that warned against "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror," it is the fear of terrorism that must be avoided in order to defend and advance the Constitution.
Fighting the criminal activity upon which terrorism, as distinct from war, is predicated falls mainly within the general police powers of the states. In our federal system, the States, not Obama, have responsibility for the general public safety. The Constitution deliberately did not give the federal government general police powers over crime, except when it amounted to "insurrection," for the very reason that it could be used by a powerful central government to establish a national tyranny, a federal police state, just as Obama is doing.
Obama's constitution is designed for a country that stirs up enough anger abroad to create sufficient domestic fear of the other in the "homeland" that the people, no matter how objectively powerful and capable of self-defense, will nevertheless overreact by allowing seizure of centralized police powers and sacrificing the transparency required to sustain a democracy. James Madison, "father" of the U.S. Constitution, had sharp ripostes to both prongs of this strategy for imposing tyranny, warning that, "popular government without popular information ... is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both," and that "if Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
The direction of this farce by a former Senior Lecturer on the Constitution from the University of Chicago has raised legitimate questions about his actual bonds to the principles he has sworn numerous times to support. It is worth remembering that the only mention of "Safety" in the Constitution is found under the powers of Congress, not of the President, in the habeas corpus suspension clause, Art. I, Sec. 9 (2). The only other similar concessions of liberty that the Constitution makes to safety is, in time of war, to waive indictment by Grand Jury of active-duty military, Amend. V, and to permit, according to law, the somewhat archaic-sounding quartering of soldiers "in any house." 1 Amend. III.
The Constitution, by mention of "the common defense" in its preamble, does not elevate that objective above its other listed fundamental goals of justice, general welfare and the blessings of liberty. The Declaration of Independence did not announce a new government dedicated to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of safety." It did not, in Lincoln's immortal words, bring "forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created" safe . Pursuit of safety as an ultimate goal is for cowards. There would have been no Revolution against tyranny, no Declaration, no Constitution, no abolition of slavery or struggle for equal rights, no WWII against fascism, and no country worth loving had the founders and later patriots prioritized their own safety. Patriots like Snowden and Manning did not prioritize their own safety. A free people does not prioritize safety, if those people want to retain their liberty.
The Constitution was written for a nation embarked on a brave new mission in pursuit of self-determined justice, equality, and the blessings of liberty. Having defeated the most powerful empire in the world, the founders were less worried about the ability of a free people to defend themselves against enemies from without than preventing enemies from within, especially those using their own government, from subverting the unique republic they had created. They wrote a charter that provides a road-map for preventing tyranny by restraining government powers, not by expansion of those powers to chase a fantasy concept of "100% safety." Even while the new country remained vulnerable to attack by the world's most powerful empire, one of those restraints on government embodied George Washington's warning against standing armies by limiting military appropriations to two years. [Art. I, Sec 8 (12).] Obama's revised Constitution for cowards--where somehow "safety" from the political paranoia of a perpetual threat of terrorism becomes the "number one responsibility" of its chief executive--allows tyranny to flourish, fertilized by often manufactured fears of remote, little understood threats.
Obama's performance on August 9 framed a defining choice at a "t ruly unique moment in America's constitutional history. " For those who prefer to think of Obama as one who is feckless or incompetent in carrying out his true values rather than a fraud, this is the occasion to pause and study Obama's August 9 performance in some detail. Upon such appraisal, Obama's deception appears so indisputable that it cannot be attributed to mere error and incompetence rather than deliberate and polished prevarication on behalf of tyranny. Since Obama relies upon his likability and perceived honesty to support his popularity, public understanding of Obama's modus operandi by focusing a lens on this single public performance could cause his ratings to continue their decline into Nixonian territory.
A step ahead or still behind?
Couched in the terms of all tyrants, "we're here to protect you," Obama's press conference tried to spin to himself the credit for making NSA spying more transparent. Since Edward Snowden had already accomplished that, Obama performed a major tactical maneuver by claiming, with the assistance of NSA parsing, that he had "called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations" on May 23, 2013, just before Snowden blew the whistle on them. But his supposed "call" occurred three days after Snowden left for Hong Kong , at least weeks after Snowden had started gathering documents, and many months after Snowden started corresponding with the well-known gadfly journalist Glenn Greenwald and with Laura Poitras, who was herself under Obama's close surveillance at the time. Are we to believe that Obama's vast, expensive, algorithm-driven Panopticon empire was totally clueless about a defector from inside the surveillance state who had already run off with a good portion of his state secrets? Maybe. If so, it shows just how useless his surveillance empire is for the purpose that Obama claims it is intended.
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