I have to admit that sometimes watching the Obama administration so strenuously trying to further the growth of American fascism has its lighter moments. As Steven Colbert sums up one episode:Glenn Greenwald had several media appearances this past week on matters surrounding wikileaks, the Obama administration's continuing lawbreaking, his relentless pursuit of whistleblowers and growing illegal ties to corporate entities that want to steal you blind and limit your freedom to fight back.The Obama administration's Justice Department advised the largest bank in America where to find a corporate hacker to fabricate information that could be used to blackmail American journalists. And they totally blew it.
The most hilarious of his appearances was on the Colbert Report.
Part One:
Part Two:
Greenwald was also on Cenk Uygur's Young Turks show:
And he was on Democracy Now, for a long segment:
To those of you who read Progressive Alaska and remain ardent Obama supporters, how can you rationalize this president's war on whistleblowers, especially the aspects like this example, where he enables corporations to break the law to defame honest journalists, merely because those journalists want you, me and other people to know the truth?
9 comments:
In some ways, Obama is worse than Bush because he tricked people into believing he would be the change we so desperately needed. And in fact, he is still renditioning, torturing, not investigating war crimes on and on and fucking on...
Wow, Anonymous, I was thinking these exact thoughts an hour or so ago. Yes, at least with Bush, we knew what we were dealing with. Obama came in with so much promise and consistently disappoints.
Blue_in_AK
Do we know that Obama explicitly had a hand in this or was it individuals operating independently in the Justice Department?
Yeah, this certainly is NOT the change that I voted for!
The sad thing - at least one of them - was that the press had ample opportunities during the presidential campaign to as Obama what he would actually do vis a vis "national security", but they never did.
So we have the President bought right in to the National Scurity State with no moves to change it - the NSA build out of Regional Operations Centers continues apace; Robert Gates contineus as SecDef - a bigger war criminal the republicans never produced; the Intelligence community generally runs amok with the tacit if not worshipful approval of the White House and Biden and Congress.
And those of us who talk about this stuff, Phil, are labelled either naive or crackpots, or both.
Mark Springer
Bethel
Ah, yes, another sensationalist narrative.
typical of phil's style, so indicated because of the usual butchering of basic journalistic ethic.
So far, there is only evidence that one person who is supposed to hold some unreported connection to or position within the US Justice Dept is alleged to have recommended a law firm to B of A.
There is no evidence yet uncovered or provided that could possibly link the un-named alleged Justice Dept mentioned in the story with any other person in the Justice Dept., let alone make the wild-assed leap that there's a conspiracy in the Justice Dept that leads directly to Obama and makes Obama complicit.
Bush spent eight years embedding wingnut prosecutors and wingnut civilian administrators in every dept and office of government. That most of them have not yet been rooted out, and many of them may never be rooted out, is widely known.
So if one wingnut in the Justice Dept did recommend to some one person at B of A to hire a certain law firm, that's not unusual, it's not so likely to be unexpected for something like that to happen.
What it is not, is that it is not evidence that anyone can say that Obama was complicit, it's not even evidence that one could factually say the Justice Dept was complicit. All the evidence provides is that one person acted to recommend something to another person. There is no evidence produced which proves anything beyond that.
But, as is usual, those with no journalistic ethic will take simple conjecture, wild assed assumptions, and they'll take that and use nothing more than that to craft a narrative to suit their own bias and prejudice if they see it might serve their own personal interest.
Hack journalism is worse than no journalism at all.
Inventive biased fantasies aren't any substitute for truth. There's nothing progressive about basing opinions on speculative fiction. Leave that crap to Faux News.
10:09
I'm with you on this criticism.
It is really sensationalist to suspect that various government entities might seek to do something well.. illegal. That would be illegal wouldn't it? That never happens here! To imagine that someone might think to hide such activities through 'recommending', 'outsourcing' and 'contracting' this to a shadowy web of shell companies...what utter fiction.
Like you said:
But, as is usual, those with no journalistic ethic will take simple conjecture, wild assed assumptions, and they'll take that and use nothing more than that to craft a narrative to suit their own bias and prejudice if they see it might serve their own personal interest.
But really, there is a lot more evidence to look at.
What burns progressives is not that Bush embedded wingnuts everywhere (to paraphrase); but that all of Obama's attempts to address the bad policies and mismanagement (not to mention probable crimes committed by office holders and their influencers) during the previous administration's tenure have been frustrated by these 'stay behind wingnuts'.
His frustration has been so eloquently expressed so many times.
The efforts to free the probable hundreds who have been kidnapped, and then transported across international borders to indefinite detention and mistreatment of all types have failed. They have failed because of these stay behinds. The president has instructed that all this shall end and it has not.
There is a sadly familiar pattern to this.
All the corporate fraudsters and banksters who escaped with billions of dollars in 'bonuses' and 'profits' just as the scams came tumbling down have also escaped. They have escaped justice, and largely escaped with their assets intact. They have escaped despite the diligent attempts to investigate and prosecute them. The SEC, DOJ, and many other federal agencies have been thwarted in their efforts to carry out the president's instructions to do their jobs. It is the embedded wingnuts who are to blame yet again.
These failed efforts to prosecute criminals without regard to their wealth and power have also been described by President Obama on many occasions. His despair was evident as he explained how the theft of billions of dollars through phony mortgages and other financial schemes was responsible for misallocation and waste of our economic resources on a scale never before seen. The collateral damage of millions of families losing their homes and a significant portion of their planned retirement savings brought tears to his eyes as he explained to the nation how all these folks had escaped justice.
The matter of the stay behind wingnuts who forced the president to 'make a deal' with the health insurance industry is yet another sad example of the president's will being thwarted. His vocal complaints were unable to force the wingnuts to compromise. His distress was evident in his great health care failure speech.
Soon the stay behind wingnuts will force him to cut Social Security and Medicaid. Unfortunately for the stay behind wingnuts, they won't be able to take the credit for this, as they will force the president to take credit for this 'bipartisan solution'.
In the interests of preventing 'hack journalism' in the comments here, I will be back to post the links to all these great speeches and thwarted efforts to root out the wingnut policies and those responsible for them, just as soon as I find them.
It's a good thing that the President has made such a Herculean effort to expose and counteract the efforts of the Bush stay behind wingnuts. As you stated:
Inventive biased fantasies aren't any substitute for truth. There's nothing progressive about basing opinions on speculative fiction.
In the meantime as someone said somewhere:
"Just because Faux Noise spews crap, does not mean they have a monopoly on crap spewing."
That crap spewing of nothing but compounded innuendo didn't change the lack of any evidence that connects Obama to the allegations.
Crafting conspiracy, even if you think it's more cogent than Glenn Beck's efforts, is still only crafting of unsubstantiated conspiracy.
That crap spewing of nothing but compounded innuendo didn't change the lack of any evidence that connects Obama to the allegations.
Crafting conspiracy, even if you think it's more cogent than Glenn Beck's efforts, is still only crafting of unsubstantiated conspiracy.
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