Obama Worse Than Bush On Civil Liberties Abuses
The emperor has no clothes. Now that the President has been exposed by the likes of concerned patriots like Edward Snowden, he is running around trying to rescue his legacy and save face to the staunch leftists who once supported him. Make no mistake: these recent new proposals are in response to U.S. tech companies, such as Cisco and Google, possibly losing billions in future sales to foreign firms rather than concern for the individual citizen.
Obama has had five years to prevent and reverse these Constitutional abuses, but has deliberately chosen otherwise. By renewing the PATRIOT Act, he not only went back on yet another campaign promise, but also has taken the level of governmental abuse to new lows with each passing year in office. So much for the President understanding that the Constitution was designed to be a limitation document and not some social Utopian permission slip.
This sort of response is on par for an administration that makes it a habit of apologizing rather than asking for permission. Obama is even worse on civil liberties abuses than George Bush. As hard as that is to believe, this was not the conclusion of some Right wing rag, but instead it comes from the left’s beloved American Civil Liberties Union. Please read that again and let it sink in. Obama is worse than Bush, and the cited report is more than two years old.
The National Press Club recently had James Bamford, the world’s leading expert on the NSA, speak on how everyone is a target and how off-the-rails our government has gone under the guise of “preventing terrorism.” After his shocking speech I specifically asked him, “Is the current administration worse than the previous?” To this he replied, “Obama is worse than Bush, especially when you consider the war on whistleblowers.” He went on to add that the Left is complacent in this in part because it is their guy in office. They would be reacting much “more aggressively” against these violations if it were not for their party loyalty. The silence is deafening, just like the results of his drone program.
The very idea that the U.S. public would take these violations without a more vigorous fight lets us know just how controlled we are as a society through political propaganda. Recently, the repeal of the Smith-Mundt Act now makes it legal to “officially” use propaganda on the American public. You would think that, after Watergate and all the turmoil of the 1960’s, the baby boomers would have become better advocates for Constitutional limitations being maintained rather than drinking Big Brother’s Kool-Aid.
Back in the 1970’s, the Church commission took broad steps to try to limit political power and return the individual to their proper place as master over their government. Senator Frank Church went on to give a specific warning to the American public. And given the recent revelations, it should send a chill down any constitutionally-minded Patriot’s spine. He said:
“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church (1975)
James Bamford explained that the existing situation has grown so bad since the Church warning that we have what amounts to a “turn-key tyranny” system in place. With just minimal effort, the government could institute a takeover and crush all dissent through its existing powers. This is what the Left fails to understand in the ongoing 2nd Amendment debate. It is not the ability to hunt, but the ability to have a final check against a rogue government (no matter how small the chance) that drives the emotional elements in this narrative. Leftists have a blinding faith in government, as long as they’re the ones in charge, which prevents them from understanding what a disarmed public truly means.
The status quo crowd will fiddle away as Rome burns, cooking in a pot with the rest of the frogs around them while our liberties are taken from us. They and their type (Obama, Reed, Pelosi, Clinton, McCain, Graham, and even Romney) argue that “it is for your own good” and that they “know what’s best,” as if the government is some Marxist parent. This is the same crowd who revealed during the Amash Amendment that their true loyalties reside with the state, and not with the individual citizen.
No matter who you would have voted for in the last two presidential election cycles, the only ones who addressed the rising police state were the Libertarians and the Green Party. Dissenters within the establishment’s own parties were labeled as, “outside the mainstream” for asking fundamental questions about the expanding surveillance of the American public. The establishment in both parties is, at its very nature, authoritarian. Is it any wonder they were never included in the presidential debates, which, by the way, are not run by an independent and objective organization, but instead made up of Republican and Democratic Party insiders?
Governments never give back power by their very nature. Ask yourself how many laws they have repealed versus how many are created each year. The President’s promises of reform are all talk until I hear of mass firings and drastic budget cuts. Preventing terrorism has been the bogeyman for every major abuse of civil liberties since the fall of Communism. Billions in bloated programs, thousands of employees, and the loss of liberty are the fruits of a runaway government.
When we look back a few years from now, it will probably come to light that many of the reforms the President proposed will have amounted to more broken promises and semantic double-talk designed as a tool to fool the public into trusting a habitually lying government. From the past, with Operation Mockingbird and MK-ULTRA, to the present revelations by Edward Snowden, the American public can be certain that the government will operate under a continued veil of secrecy—not just for legitimate national security concerns but as a continued power grab to control its citizenry. Until that transparency spotlight is shined on the inner workings of our growing police state, we are but blind pawns in a geopolitical game of chess.
I hate the fact that so many citizens are still so complacent toward these practices. Before Snowden I could see how people could dismiss the claims of massive government surveillance on Americans, but now it is documented and proven beyond any doubt. Those of us who were paying attention to whistleblowers such as William Binney, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, etc. all saw the puzzle pieces falling together long ago. The inevitable remark of people saying “well why should I care, I have nothing to hide” makes my skin crawl. When people say that it reveals a deep ignorance of history and what the real world is actually like. People fail to recognize what the status quo of the world really is and has always been like. It is a status quo of tyranny and oppression and the fact that us as americans are completely sheltered from the rest of the world and get no real education, especially of history in our school systems, make us naive enough to believe that “it could never happen here”. I think of the American experiment that our founders designed as a deviation from the mean of civilization. The mean being a consistent form of tyranny, whether it was in the form of a monarchy, dictatorship, papacy, caste system, patriarch class, consul, etc. This is the only country founded on dissent of the people. The first government by the people of the people and for the people. Not against the people. I love the term turn-key tyranny, because that is the exact scaffolding they are building. I also despise the people who were crucifying Bush for doing these things but are giving Obama a pass because it’s their guy. Same for the Bush bangers the other way around. These powers don’t go away after your guy is out of office, so even if you trust who ever is in there with these powers, who knows what kind of person will be wielding them in the future. I guess what I am saying is that thinking people understand an oppressive government is the norm. The founders knew this and installed a system of checks and balances to make it very difficult for any one person or group to have too much power. These checks and balances are now just a fig leaf disguised as oversight and we are closer than ever to see our society’s regression to the mean.