The George W. Bush administration stacked our government with loons who believe in "eye babies" whose job it was specifically to weed out applicants and employees who, while they might have impeccable credentials otherwise, were deemed to be "too liberal."
Obama's cave on the FISA thing is a disappointment but not a surprise. John Cole puts it well. What Obama's actions tell me is that if he isn't even willing to stand up and fight for the discovery process on warrantless surveillance - which is absolutely all this telecom immunity fight is about - then how likely is it that he will pursue rigorous investigations and accountability for all the other, even more serious, crimes that have been perpetuated by this horrible administration, especially after Bush is out of office and the pressure is on for Closure?
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What Obama's actions tell me is that if he isn't even willing to stand up and fight for...
You need to give Obama a break. Quit demanding that he toe the line on every issue when he is trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Suffice it to say that he will be far better on this issue than John McCain would be. And any efforts to tear him down over this now only increases the chances we will end up with President McCain.
General elections are the time when you have to temper your idealism with practicality. We can't get a perfect FISA bill now and we can't just blow it off and do nothing. So the only option is to accept a compromise you are not entirely happy with and then work on fixing it later once your guy is in office.
I have refrained from speaking on the issue, because I really don't know the right answer. I am disappointed that he didn't hold out for no-immunity. I don't care if the phone companies have to pay up, but I would like there to be a forum to decide whether they acted legally, and that forum will not be available.
On the other hand, this is politics. Obama can't win without playing them, no matter how much we don't -- or he doesn't -- like it. I don't feel as though this tells us much about how he would behave as president, but I do think that it will be a sad eye-opener to folks who thought he could wholly rise above.
Nah! Obama's gotten all the breaks he's gonna get from me. I'm still going to vote for him and support him enthusiastically, and I don't insist that he "toe the line" on every issue. I think he's wrong on this and I don't like what his stance on this issue says about his candidacy. Democrats have allowed the Bush administration to frame this debate as being about national security and it is no such thing. There has not been a single update to FISA that Democrats have opposed. The only sticking point in these negotiations has been over the issue of telecom immunity and the only reason the Bush administration is fighting so hard for it is to stop the discovery process in lawsuits that are currently underway which is the only avenue the public will ever have for exposing these crimes to the light of day. What's distressing about Obama's positon here is not so much that he may disagree about the seriousness of these crimes, or about whether or not it's important to hold the Bush administration accountable for breaking the law (although those things matter to me a lot) but that he is so ineffectual at re-framing this debate, thinking perhaps (and in my view, mistakenly) that it is politically expedient to go along with the Republican spin. For the life of me, I don't understand how - as capable and charismatic as Obama is, and as damaged as the Republican brand is now - he can't force a new narrative over the bullshit that Republicans have been feeding us for so long.
I was disappointed today when I saw Obama's comment saying he supports executions for child rapists. But then, I have to remember that no one has ever been elected president while campaigning against the death penalty. It is a losing issue for Democrats especially.
Ideally, I'd love to see the FISA bill defeated until we can get it right. But the reality is that Republicans will filibuster and veto anything that does not have immunity for the telecoms. So it is this bill or nothing. And I believe it would be irresponsible to allow nothing to happen until after the election.
And while I think Greenwald is great, I think he is going overboard on this issue. (Going after Keith Olbermann today?!?! Come on!!!)
I don't buy the sky-is-falling arguments. I think we can survive a bad bill and live to fix it down the road. But if we screw around and allow McCain to get into office and appoint a bunch more Scalia clones to the High Court, then all bets are off.
I think we can survive a bad bill, but I don't think that we can survive letting Bush off the hook for the crimes he and his cronies have committed. I think we are paying the price, today, for letting Richard Nixon off the hook. We might not have been able, then, to foresee the problems that would arise from that but we should have learned our lesson by now.
I can understand why the telecom immunity issue may seem like not such a big deal, but I think one only has to look at how desperately the Bushies are working to push it through to get a sense of how big a deal it is - to them. I think it has to do with way more than just protecting their campaign contributors. And I think letting them get away with it is a huge mistake that does not bode well for public accountability. Fixing it later will certainly be much harder, if it's even an option at all.
I think FISA is a very big deal; I am just not sure how the math works in this one--can we win if he pitches a fight? I don't know the answer to that one, but the history is bad.
I, too, was disappointed by his comments on child rape (though he makes the same ones in The Audacity of Hope). For me, that is less of a big deal. I understand how death penalty proponents feel, even though I disagree with them strenuously (though death for rape seems to me so ridden with partriarchism that I can't believe we even talk about it). And, fortunately, those sorts of death penalty decisions never belong to the president.
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