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NEDERLANDS | ENGLISH
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16 June 2010 |
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|  | Salon
Jon Stewart on Obama's executive power record
Related article series by DeepJournal: The Other Face of Barack Obama.
- By Glenn Greenwald [Read article below video].
When ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero last week addressed the progressive conference America's Future Now, he began by saying: "I'm going to start provocatively . . . I'm disgusted with this president." Last night, after Obama's Oval Office speech, Jon Stewart began his show with an 8-minute monologue on Obama's executive power and civil liberties record which, in essence, provided just some of the reasons why Romero's strong condemnation is so justified. None of this will be remotely new to any readers here, but it's still nice to see its being distilled so clearly by a voice which even the most hardened Obama loyalists have decided is a credible and trustworthy one (at least when he's mocking Sarah Palin and exposing Fox News; we'll see what reaction this provokes from them, if any). One point: contrary to the blatant strawman incessantly raised by those loyalists, note that the criticisms here are not grounded in complaints that Obama has failed to act quickly enough to usher in progressive policies -- let's repeat that: the vast bulk of criticisms of Obama are not grounded in complaints that he has failed to act quickly enough to usher in progressive policies -- but are instead based on horrendous policies which Obama himself has affirmatively and explicitly adopted as his own, many of which directly contradict what he vowed to do as President (speaking of which: see this NYT Editorial today lambasting what it describes as the Obama administration's disgraceful and inexcusable conduct in the Maher Arar case): UPDATE: I'm working on writing about the extremely strange case of Bradley Manning, the Army Private and intelligence analyst who -- according to Wired's Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter -- contacted convicted hacker and mental illness sufferer Adrian Lamo, out of the blue, and confessed, over the Internet, to leaking a slew of sensitive materials to WikiLeaks, including the Apache helicopter attack video that caused so much controversy recently. Lamo then quickly converted from ex-hacker and supposed "journalist" into government informant, turned over his conversations with Manning to federal authorities, thus causing Manning's detention by the U.S. Army. While I hoped to have something posted today, this is a very complicated and bizarre case in several ways, and I'm still trying to explore a few remaining questions I have, so it may not be until tomorrow. In the meantime, the long-time, superb commenter (and blogger), DCLaw1, recently unveiled himself on his blog -- welcome to the world of non-pseudonymous blogging, Chris Martinez -- and today, on his blog, has posted an interview he conducted with me about a variety of issues, which can be read here. UPDATE II: Kevin Drum writes about the case of an American Muslim who has been effectively banished from returning to the U.S. by being placed -- with no explanation, no due process, and no evidence -- on the no-fly list. Kevin writes, correctly, that "this is an abomination, pure and simple" and ends by asking: "How on earth can Barack Obama stand by and continue to allow stuff like this to happen?" Isn't clear by now that he "allows stuff like this to happen" because it's what he supports and believes in? Just look at his own policy pronouncements, which ought to dispel any doubt that.
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