our belief that no one is above the law. People actually believed that and worked hard to make sure the criminals would one day be brought to justice.

That, looking back, was so incredibly naive. I do remember a few people telling us that but we usually thought of them as people who were simply trying to diminish the crimes or of some other ulterior motive. I wish I could apologize to them now. THEY were right, we were wrong.

I'm pretty damn old, and I can't remember ever having been as wrong about a politician as I was about Barack Obama. One of the results is that I have never been as pessimistic about electoral politics as a tool for change as I am now, several years into the Obama administration.

and the smile ...yeah, i should have listened to the posters here who were warning us, but, i didn't..by 2010, i felt like I had been punched in the gut ...i've voted for 4 plus decades, and obama fooled me..once .

Pretty much every thing in speeches and primary debates on policy made that clear.

But it was Edwards! So I would rather not think too much about that, lol. Talk about buying campaign rhetoric!

the draconian posture on journalists and whistle-blowers, expansion of coastal oil-drilling, and a few other such pesky issues.

we would have had every reason to believe he'd adopt these positions. Many here knew all that because they were paying close attention during the debates and stuff.

He ran to the left of himself. You guys are so FOS about how y'all knew he was going to be *this* far right of center it's laughable. No one knew (period)

his lies about NAFTA (remember the story about telling Canada not to worry), not mentioning that he would leave all the John Yoo types in the DOJ instead of cleaning house, suggesting he was seriously against torture when in fact the best he would do to prevent it would be to issue a meaningless executive order against some forms of it, his false promise not to renew the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, his commitment to a public option for health insurance, falsely presenting himself as an opponent of the excesses of the Patriot Act (and then signing the reauthorization bill in 2009).

A lawyer really doesn't have opinions on things. It depends on what a customer wants. Like lawyers one day vigorously opposing something and the next moment with a different customer defending the law he opposed before. Their client tells them what is the truth. Obama did not have any opinions on DOMA or same-sex marriage and on so many other things. "Tell me what to think and I will think about it".

I hope we get a candidate who is not a lawyer, but someone who has some core beliefs be them a farmer or doctor or even a soldier, just anyone but a corporate executive or lawyer.

eom

.... they are all really working on the same team, and it is not us.

n/t

Rather than address the unconstitutionality of it all, they decided to argue that violating the law and sending arms to the Contra-revolutionaries in Nicaragua would be OK. The arms for profit to the Ayatollah would help pay the bills and pay back old friends. Thus, Poppy pardoned his fellow traitors and got himself -- and his sons -- off the hook.

in suing a sitting president and turning his efforts to do his job into civil\criminal offenses if those things had been prosecuted? I think definitely.

My problem is that without a thorough investigation and trial, the truth about Watergate -- or Iran-Contra or any of the other assorted treasons from the October Surprise to Selection 2000 and beyond, and all their associated criminality -- never has the chance to be known by the public. When truth is "legally" buried, not only does it defeat justice, it defeats democracy.

I think the endless investigations for partisan gain (ie. whitewater, Fostergate, etc. I don't include zippergate, because Clinton left the trail for that himself) are probably what Ford was trying to prevent. No such luck. But, I completely understand the reasoning.

Who was going to investigate Iran - Contra and implicate their own party? Is there a statute of limitations for such investigations?

Sadly, what Bush did was legal via congressional approval. The most blatant lies were perpetrated by scapegoats. Bush was totally shielded. The selection of 2000 was also legally decided.

From what I understand, torture was not illegal, thus a gray area subject to policy positions in the US. But, not subject to legal investigation or prosecution.

at the pleasure of the gods (or so they think).

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--Orwell--

The system has always been a 'good ole boys network'. They would NEVER be prosecuted, whether Obama was POTUS or any other Democrat or Independent. I guarantee you that if Bernie or Warren or anyone were in Obama's place, NOTHING would have been done to anyone in Bushco, ever. Period.

So we abdicate our moral duty to prosecute war criminals? Bush, his cabinet, and other high ranking Repunlikanz should have been arrested and extradited to be dealt qith by either the UN or the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The two Dems wore red. The two Repubs wore blue. And Obama wore blue, but posed with the Bushies.

I hope that when his presidency is over that he will be honest about how he felt during these moments. To hell with decorum.

looking for all the world like a gigantic baby with a huge turd in his diaper. Or a reanimated corpse. I can't decide which.

Tea leaf reading is said to as effective as man suit reading.

And body language reading, now that is reliably useful stuff for pundits to fill the endless cable hours.

that very same night. I am sure there is a conspiracy afoot . . .

Dave & the President almost never wear light tan.....hmmmm...........

Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, let's give them all a big fucking gold medal.

Just don't get caught smoking pot or driving while black, they'll beat you to a pulp and throw your ass in prison before you can say John Yoo.

But never think that crime does not pay...Because if you are in the big time it pays quite well indeed, and you never have to fear the law.

It's not that carefully choreographed.

Usually it's got no more art than the dynamics of crowds and performers in a sports stadium, which haven't changed very much since the days of the Coloseum, and which come naturally. (Today capital sits in the emperor's box.) The players know the game.

And the voting clienteles of the Democrats are not just the tiny fraction of formal liberals and Third Way wonks and party hacks, but workers, women, blacks, immigrants, Latinos, the poor, LGBT, the subaltern classes, also genuine progressives, unions, teachers, most academics and scientists, people who understand the seriousness of the ecological crisis, people who want spending on health and education not military, and generally those who oppose war and profit-making and corporate control. This is the coalition who should be making the revolution, but they're not.

Are our conditions of life less oppressive under Democratic governments? Yes. More or less. Generally. Is this enough? No, and not just because the few reforms won are not enough. And not just because the wars and the plunder and the rule of Wall Street continue, and the planet itself continues to be burned, so that we will all lose our future. But because a scam cycle has been established. Status-quo Democrats disappoint, then are replaced by Genghis Khan Republicans who are revolutionary in pushing the country further right and making new breakthroughs in atrocity, causing everyone reasonable to run back to the status-quo Democrats and celebrate their return.

This game requires the two parties to be genuinely different from one another on many issues that matter, if not on the consensus of how the political economy and imperialism are supposed to work. Democrats make some real reforms on things that matter (like gay rights and Lily Ledbetter and the ridiculously byzantine inadequate reform of the health system which indisputably added coverage for 10 or 20 million people who didn't have it).

The general pattern is that Republican outrages in extending the power of the repressive and warmaking state and of capital are ambitious, and in your face, and often trampling the law. Later a Democratic admin effects a legalistic consolidation and expansion of the same outrages - even as the right-wing screams about socialism and the planned inadequacy of the Democrats sets up the next Republican government. Both end up making mincemeat of constitutional rule, but one with more the appearance of legality.

It's a real conundrum. But the fatal global crises are not being addressed!

Huh. I didn't know that

The implication is that progressives are really the same thing as teabaggers. Yes, it's dumb, but we're not dealing with people capable of subtle reasoning here, as this particularly boneheaded alert makes clear.

if you bring up the BFEE...I know, you would think only trolls would do that...but alas, we have a BFEE cheerleading squad here that is PROUD!

isn't just a policy difference, it's an expression of genuine patriotism that just went awry"

warehouse, next to the railroad tracks, where the cops are waiting, badges removed.

as a censor with the Soviet propaganda ministry.

Maybe they can still get a job at the NSA to search out the "terrorists" among the Quakers and Occupy activists. Is Joe Lieberman's commie-hunting outfit still around? Too bad about Ratzinger, I think Francis has cut the budget for the Office of the Inquisition.

If they're still young and their IQ is low enough, maybe they can take the cop test.

Etc.

HEY ALERTER!

Come in here and have an open debate on the merits and using reason - like a Democrat! Why won't you? What do you fear?

Thanks for this, LeftyMom - very choice stuff. It's not the most important thing in the world, but the fundamentalism and Stalinoid thinking on this board also needs to be exposed.

So, they lurk and await the right hour.

.... if you don't like the thread, trash it...

and jurors please sign your name.

Having your own people complicit in the crimes is definitely a brake on prosecuting the other people.

And when a Democrat becomes president, then the crimes continue but with better legal cover. The system is consolidated. Bush's parapolitical surveillance state, a revolutionary achievement, is rendered legal and established, and expanded, and defended in public. Hooray for the rule of law!

This is not what Democrats must be.

We ask:

“Did any CIA agent get indicted for torturing people? No.

“Did any CIA agent get indicted for destroying the videotapes that showed the torture? No.

“Did any CIA agent get indicted for murdering prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq? No.”


“We tortured some folks,” the president said in an Aug. 1 White House press conference.



Aren’t We The People also entitled to know the true names of high-level CIA personnel who tortured at will, as well as the presidents and members of the Judiciary Committee who gave them the authority to?



Here’s one from Alex Kane of AlterNet: “CIA went beyond legal memo. In 2002, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel drafted a report authorizing CIA torture, saying that the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and stress positions were perfectly legal. It was written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo” (who is still a University of California law school professor and frequent writer-lecturer) …

“But even that memo attempting to legalize torture wasn’t enough for the CIA … McClatchy reported that the CIA went beyond what it was authorized to do by the Bush administration.

“In a phone interview with AlterNet, (Jason) Leopold (of Al Jazeera America) said this revelation casts a harsh light on the Obama administration’s arguments that those who relied on Department of Justice legal advice shouldn’t be prosecuted.

“?‘It literally demolishes any rationale that Obama and (Attorney General Eric) Holder had for not investigating, for not bringing criminal charges, or even launching a criminal inquiry against people who were responsible for implementing this,’ said Leopold” (“5 Explosive Revelations Leaked From Senate Report Exposing CIA Torture,” Alex Kane, AlterNet, April 15).

If you are a part of the BFEE, you are above the law...that has clearly been demonstrated from the early days of the S&L scandals. We only respect the law if it applies to normal citizens. If the PTB start an illegal war, then they are immune from prosecution in the United States.

We made that clear to the world.

Pete Brewton's book, “The Mafia, CIA & George Bush,” is a must-own for those interested in the workings of the Bush Organized Crime Family. Written by a former Houston Post reporter, the book documents, literally, the way the Mafia, the CIA and those connected and related to George Poppy Bush -- and to the late Lloyd Bentsen -- looted more than 1,000 of the nation’s Savings and Loans institutions — and pretty much got away with it, scot-free.

The superpower aggression of 2003, and the failures to hold the perpetrators accountable either in 2006 or after 2009, were a signal to all the world's junior imperialist powers: go for it!

The hypocrisy of the American rhetoric around the present Ukraine situation is a great example. If you had held Bush and Co. accountable, you might have had the moral standing to pontificate about Putin today (although not when you're also backing Kiev's aggressions against its own people, but anyway).

even by the highest people in power, made the rest of the world a much more unstable place. They see the total lip service we give to our own justice system and think 'why not us too'?

The 1st amendment has really taken a beating over the past decades. However the 2nd seems to be untouchable.

Many of his youthful supporters to become Paul supporters. They were promised change and got nothing. At least that was what they perceived. Some went tea party way until tea party was co-opted by Republicans. They then went Occupy and still did not find what they wanted. Paul's rhetoric appears to offer them the change they are craving. Only the wise know Paul's libertarian ways are the ways of the Koch brothers and the one percent. The corporate masters that still control our government.

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is devoted to absolving the administration and the Democratic leadership of their role in this. The bait-and-switch of liberatory rhetoric during campaigns followed by total obedience to corporate capital once in power, causes many people to turn to the snake oils of the paleocons and ostensibly anti-statist libertarians.

People are disaffected with repression and the surveillance state, war on drugs, militarism and imperialism, and the general kowtow to bankers and corporations and neoliberal policy. Seeing what the Democrats do, they fall for the rhetoric of the libertarian salesmen.

In response, instead of calls for the Democrats to finally start doing the right things on these issues, you have all the posts here demonizing, not just the Pauls (and rightly so, for the most part) but also attacking anyone who is concerned with these issues. Altogether superfluous "Fuck Paul" threads become a daily, ritualized two-minutes hate.

The point, again: to absolve Democratic leadership of their role, to present them as blameless and entirely good. It must be screamed and repeated that Democrats are actually extremely progressive and getting all they can against the Republican opposition on all these issues (within the realm of the possible, you understand, don't be naive and don't be asking for no ponies, kay?). Anyone who says otherwise (even if from a leftist critique) is secretly or unconsciously WORKING FOR PAUL!!! A total dichotomy is set up. Its logic is team fandom: Are you with us, or are you with Rand Paul?

One wishes this kind of dichotomy would be reserved (and actually used) where it makes sense: For example, Are you for the survival of the human species, or are you with the fossil fuel industry? Are you for human rights, or are you for a surveillance state? Are you for human rights and justice, or are you for continuing drug prohibition? Are you for reality, or do you think permanent-growth economics can be sustained in the long term?

Instead we're asked if we fly a blue flag or a red one.

the Bush War Criminals. The justification of course will be to close the door to the past and allow the country to move forward.

They are used as a persuasion tactic to control some people's behavior.

and it's pretty disgusting.

It's like they got off scot free after getting rich by lying us into a war after the still questionable to a lot of us 9/11. Oh and all after not even really having been elected in the first place.

Obama and his team aren't the only ones culpable for letting justice slide. Also to blame is the figurative coma way too many citizens seem to be in.

disaster for the last 80 years. No one will take them on.

RIP Bill

and didn't get elected because of it....No New Taxes, I think is what got him into trouble. I rather liked him for that.

Bush Jr is/was not bright enough to answer Cheney and company's excuses/reasons for war. I think he was as duped as some of those in the Congress who are normally doves...and painting puppies is therapy.

The things he had his hands in is mindboggling.

under a capitalist system of centuries with an imperial history of millennia to draw upon. "NWO," whatevs. We have a visible ruling class and they are in a web of international alliances with other ruling elites creating global institutions for exercising private power.

... now that everyone is back and rested up from the weekend.