You don't engage with why the politician we supported in 2008, who explicitly denounced sacrificing civil liberties for security, has not only continued most of the worst Bush/Cheney police state policies but in some cases made them even more onerous.
You don't engage with why the politician we supported in 2008 has protected egregious war criminals and torturers from the prosecution required by law--the Convention Against Torture--and extended the drone war to several other Muslim countries, resulting in the horrific deaths of many innocents.
Who in the Democratic Party on a national level is standing up without apology and with principle to denounce in full-throttled terms the assault on the Bill of Rights and the metastasizing war state?
All the smug folks who are here attacking Ron Paul apparently don't want there to be anyone raising these issues in the national campaign.
Shhhh! Don't talk about this!
And of course, the vast majority of all the smug Democratic democratic centralists here probably would have been howling against George Bush's pursuit of the same policies. Ah, but the Party Line has shifted! Now to be a Good Democrat one has to be for indefinite detention without trial. A Good Democrat is for giving the President the power to unilaterally assassinate citizens. A Good Democrat doesn't question the Warfare State, doesn't question the President's ability to send drones to kill people in countries with which the United States is not at war. Let me ask you this: Do those countries have the same right to send drones over our skies to kill our people? Can you say "blowback?"
I do not support Ron Paul. I repeat: I DO NOT SUPPORT RON PAUL. Paul is awful on a whole host of issues. We all know what they are.
But if you are going to play this intellectually dishonest game of calling progressives "Paulbots"--as one diarist has--for pointing out the fact that Paul is the only one of any party running a national campaign who is unequivocally denouncing such horrors as indefinite detention and unlimited war--and pointing out the completely true fact that unlimited war will inevitably result in blowback--then you have to own your own responsibility for the continuation of those horrors.
If you refuse to hold the leaders of our own party to account for being complicit in the descent into imperialism and fascism--evidenced by the adoption of indefinite detention, unlimited war and repression of street protests as Democratic policies-- then, by your logic, you support fascism and imperialism.
Partisan hackery becomes particularly disgusting when it starts running interference for a President who signs into law a measure that could legalize camps for political dissenters. Oh, you say, President Obama won't do that? You think he's going to be President forever?! What will you say when some future Republican President, beset by Occupy protests in a deteriorating economy, uses these provisions? What principle will you raise that you haven't already sh*t on by running interference for Barack Obama on this issue?
The folks here who attack Glenn Greenwald and others are either completely without any principles or willfully ignorant. Greenwald is not a partisan--he is a civil libertarian whose devotion to fundamental human rights is not subject to change depending on the partisan affiliation of an offending politician. (And that's civil libertarian, not "libertarian.")
Why is no national Democrat saying on these particular issues what Ron Paul is saying? If no national Democrat voices an unambiguous call for defending and restoring the Bill of Rights we are just supposed to acquiesce to military "justice?"
You know you are an Orwellian dissembler when you excuse abuses committed by our own Party that you would denounce when committed by the other party.