Yes, I am referring to this diary on the rec list.
She's been buying and selling the Rec List for some time now. Now, I want to draw a distinction between Hamsher and the people she employs. Some of them are all right. However their work sometimes crosses the line into that which isn't that helpful.
Because if you simply aren't going to be a cheerleader and "be helpful", well, obviously you aren't... what? A Democrat? A Liberal? Or welcome anymore?
Does the truth even matter anymore? It doesn't seem like it when Glenn Greenwald and even Amy Goodman get attacked because they simply report the truth.
Glenn Greenwald has reported, accurately, for years on the abuses that began under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. That he continues to report, accurately, on how these same abuses are being continued now makes him a pariah?
I've been ignoring Greenwald and Democracy Now (112+ / 0-)
for several years now. It has created almost no problems for me.
by bugscuffle on Sat Oct 31, 2009 at 04:28:51 PM EST
112 people rec'd that comment? That we should simply ignore Glenn Greenwald because he is now reporting on the Obama administration's actions and noted, correctly, that there are people continuing to play cheerleader despite what his administration is doing? And, adding Amy Goodman and Democracy Now simply because the comments were made on their program. Talk about shooting the messenger!
Is Prof. Jonathan Turley the next person to be attacked because he correctly notes the actions of the Obama administration?
It appears that there is no limit to our hypocrisy on torture. While blocking any criminal investigation or prosecution of American officials for our torture program, the Obama Administration is demanding to question the Sri Lanken Army Chief Sarath Fonseka over allegations of the torture in Sri Lanka.
Maybe, if enough outrage is generated, AmericaBLOG can be slighted for their "unhelpfulness" since Joe Aravosis has been so outspoken about the Obama's administration lack of action on LGBT issues.
Maybe then the Left can impose their purity tests against Digby, how dare she criticize President Obama:
This one is non-negotiable. Obama must say that American will abide by International Law, which defines preemption as an imminent threat, not some "gut" feeling by a bunch of throwback neocon psychos and silly Chicken Littles like O'Hanlon. I'm shocked that the Bush Doctrine is still in effect at all. Actually endorsing it, no matter how many promises that he will be super-duper careful, is completely unacceptable.
And then, like the teabagger's, these people on the Left who believe everyone should simply not talk about what is actually happening can then go after Markos, because it isn't like he hasn't spoken out himself.
Facts have no bias. And the fact is, that President Obama is continuing, if not trying to expand, on Bush-era claims that he specifically campaigned to end.
What makes this most recent episode particularly appalling is that the program which Obama is seeking to protect here -- the illegal Bush/Cheney NSA surveillance scheme -- was once depicted as a grave threat to the Constitution and the ultimate expression of lawlessness. Yet now, Obama insists that the very same program is such an important "state secret" that no court can even adjudicate whether the law was broken. When Democrats voted to immunize lawbreaking telecoms last year, they repeatedly justified that by stressing that Bush officials themselves were not immunized and would therefore remain accountable under the law. Obama himself, when trying to placate angry supporters over his vote for telecom immunity, said this about the bill he supported:
I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses.
Yet here is Obama doing exactly the opposite of those claims and assurances: namely, he's now (a) seeking to immunize not only telecoms, but also Bush officials, from judicial review; (b) demanding that courts be barred from considering the legality of NSA surveillance programs under any circumstances; and (c) attempting to institutionalize the broadest claims of presidential immunity imaginable via radically broad secrecy claims. To do so, he's violating virtually everything he ever said about such matters when he was Senator Obama and Candidate Obama. And he's relying on the very same theories of executive immunity and secrecy that -- under a Republican President -- sparked so much purported outrage. If nothing else, this latest episode underscores the ongoing need for Congressional Democrats to proceed with proposed legislation to impose meaningful limits and oversight on the President's ability to use this power, as this President, just like the last one, has left no doubt about his willingness to abuse it for ignoble ends.
And yet, because people accurately note that President Obama has broken pledges he made as a candidate, they should be attacked as being "unhelpful". But, who is being "helped"?
Goldman Sachs? Tim Geithner and Larry Summers were President Obama's picks. Maybe these people here can now start attacking Sen. Cantwell, a Democrat that had the gall to call out Geithner and his policies:
"I'm not sure," Cantwell responded, "because David Gregory had him almost -- trying to get a straight answer out of him. What the Treasury Secretary basically said was, yes, banks should take more risks and we should continue the loopholes and that is really appalling because, right now, we know that lack of transparency has caused this problem with the U.S. economy and Wall Street is continuing, one year later, continuing the same kind of loopholes.
The insurance companies?
Today's NY Times front page reconfirmed the news that President Obama has made a back-room deal with the pharmaceutical industry to block any Congressional health care legislation that would allow Medicare or most other parts of the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry or would allow importation of cheaper drugs from Canada.
Our troops? While President Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan and backing the same corrupt Karzai government that Bush helped to install?
Not everyone was as chipper as Gibbs. In an email to the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, Peter Galbraith, the deputy head of the United Nations' mission to Afghanistan called the election a "total fiasco."
"We are now stuck with the same corrupt and inefficient [incumbent President Hamid] Karzai that we had for the last seven years but now he is also rightly seen as illegitimate by a large segment of the Afghan population and by public opinion in the troop contributing countries," Galbraith wrote. "No amount of spin can obscure the fact that we spent upwards of $200 miilion on an election that has been a total fiasco."
Or the people of Afghanistan with our continued war?
The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation. The Soviets tried and failed. They deployed 110,000 troops, operating on less restrictive lines of communication and logistical supply than the United States. They built an Afghan army of some 45,000 troops. They operated without the constraints of American rules of engagement. They slaughtered around a million Afghans. And they lost, for the simple reason that the people of Afghanistan did not want them, or their Afghan proxies.
So, exactly who is being helped by trying to silence those who are correctly seeing what is happening in the Obama administration? And how many will our own teabagger's try to ostracize from the ranks?