Pick any day between 10 and 30 days ago. Can anyone remember the reason on Daily Kos, that day, why Obama was an asshole? Huffington Post -- same deal. While some folks might remember the day within that time-span when they themselves wrote a particularly rabid "Obama is an Asshole Because..." diary, most of us cannot.
We can narrow it down, sure. There are themes within the "Obama is an asshole" mega-meme. There are flavors of "Obama is an asshole" of the day, flavors of the week, et cetera, et ceteros, et ceteri.
Also, there are individual diarists who seem to be expert, Black Belts in every form of "Obama is an Asshole" martial arts. (example: Belching Fat Guy form, Obama is an Asshole)
Right now it's the NSA thing, which is just the latest vehicle by which the far right AND left have chosen to prove that people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are actually neocon tyrants.
Levels of expertise on this sort of thing vary. Back during the BP Gulf blowout, I wasn't an expert, but I did seem a local expert -- even with what I know about that stuff, in retrospect, I got some pretty important stuff dead wrong. One thing I didn't do was jump on any sort of bandwagon. With regard to this NSA stuff, there's an awful lot of bandwagon jumping-on here on Daily Kos. And you accuse those of us who support President Obama of yelling "Cheer Louder"?
How is Glenn Greenwald an expert on this? If he isn't, then who is?
How about David Simon? David Simon wiki is HERE. He's creator of "The Wire".
Now I'm not saying Glenn Greenwald isn't an expert. He's obviously an expert,
1. On what Presidents should do every waking hour while never having been President himself.
2. On why President Obama is an asshole (which makes him particularly popular here on Daily Kos).
From Simon's piece:
You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.
Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”
A little more:
And in fairness, having the FISA courts rulings so hidden from citizen review, makes even the discovery of such misuse problematic. The internal review of that court’s rulings needs to be somehow aggressive and independent, while still preserving national security secrets. That’s very tricky.
But this? Please. This is bullshit.
My kinda guy, although I would have labeled it "fucking bullshit" and do.
If you're going to argue against Simon's take on this, that's fine, but do read the entire piece or you'll appear....
Yes, I can hear the panicked libertarians and liberals and Obama-haters wailing in rare unison: But what about all the innocent Americans caught up in this voracious, overreaching dragnet? To which the answer is obvious if you think about the scale of this: What dragnet?
Or don't read it. A month from now you won't even remember why, on June 9th, 2013, Obama was an asshole. Because there'll be an entirely new reason.
Another piece, this one by Bob Cesca
5. Furthermore, Glenn Greenwald used the phrase “direct access,” as in unobstructed direct server access, four times in his article, most prominently in his lede, “The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.” Unless the tech companies were collectively lying, Greenwald’s use of “direct access” is inaccurate. And if it’s inaccurate, the most alarming aspect of this NSA story is untrue.
On Twitter, Greenwald defended his reporting by reiterating that the NSA said within the PRISM document that there has been “collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook…” But this could mean that the data was drawn from the servers, vetted and handed over to the NSA per Google’s stated process of legal vetting. And if the data was made available, it’s possible that the tech companies posted it on a server for the NSA analysts to download, just as you might download a file from work or a friend via Dropbox or an FTP server. Regardless, it seems as if Greenwald’s entire story hinges on a semantic interpretation of the PRISM language. And his mistake was to leap from “collection directly from servers” to “direct access.”
6. More exploded heads anyway. Anyone relaying the new information is accused of being an Obamabot.
