Return of “the Decider” - Obama Disagrees With Privacy Board Report

Former U.S. President George W. Bush was widely mocked for his now infamous utterance in the course of defending Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -  "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best". Bush passed into history as one of the least popular and disastrous leaders in American history but now his once immensely popular successor, Barack Obama is giving the man a run for his money.  Obviously more than a bit miffed over Thursday’s bombshell report by the report released by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board rebutting Obama’s ongoing defense of the indefensible the current occupant of the White House bristled, disagreeing with the report. Delivering the message through chief flack Jay Carney (a paid liar) our great leader, sold to a gullible public as a constitutional law professor demonstrated that he has just as much actual reverence for the principles expressed in that document as his predecessor (“a goddamned piece of paper”) with the following:“On the issue of [Section] 215, we simply disagree with the board’s analysis on the legality of the program”. So there we have it, the return of the unaccountable unitary executive but you could say that he never really left.

The specters of Bush and Cheney have hovered over the Obama administration since day one, the NSA programs, especially the data-mining and storage of metadata (which is an index to actual content) all a part of a tragic enabling act that was urgently pushed through a supine Congress while the scent of rotting flesh still hung in the lower Manhattan air after 9/11. The USA PATRIOT Act laid the foundation for the final implementation of the surveillance/police state as well as punched our collective ticket to demise as our once vibrant democracy and system of checks and balances were reduced to wreckage much as the twin towers themselves.  Wars were started, the NSA snooping and compiling of the most intimate details of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans picked up steam and the public was mentally bludgeoned into accepting their own eventual enslavement by a government gone rogue through the greatest mind control device known to mankind, their televisions. For years Republicans had a chokehold on the political system fueled by keeping the befuddled masses in a state of constant dread thanks to regular ‘terrorist’ alerts as well as a color coded threat level matrix that was used largely at times for political gain.

Americans saw that the Bush-Cheney regime had overstepped their bounds and done so badly so in 2008 they put their faith into a young Senator from Illinois who promised hope and change as well as transparency and voted Barack Obama into office. Now in the first year of his second term Obama has not only failed to provide the promised transparency but has become one of the greatest defenders of the secret state, secret courts and the massive and illegal surveillance colossus that holds it all together. Never has one man failed so many and the rejection of Thursday’s report by his rotten administration is just the latest example that he has been fully assimilated by the corrupt system, that is if he wasn’t just being a politician and lying his ass off about everything in the first place.

With Barry and the boys now firmly in control with three years to go and not having to worry about being re-elected the mask is now off and Americans will just have deal with having to finance their own government spying on them. Obama is on record as being committed to only the most meager and vague cosmetic changes to the NSA Stasi’s compiling their electronic dossiers for the day when the order comes to deal with the troublemakers, only they will by then be called “terrorists”, as Hermann Goering once famously summed it up: “It works the same way in any country.” But Obama is doing immense and irreparable damage to liberalism itself, not the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News/John Bircher definition but the classic concept itself. Never one to shy away from scathing broadsides delivered to hypocrites libertarian Justin Raimondo weighs in today at Antiwar.com in his column “The Snowden Effect and the Liberal Implosion” from which I excerpt:

We haven’t seen anything like this since the Vietnam war era: an administration caught red-handed illegally and systematically spying on Americans in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war. At that time, too, the political class was badly divided, with the hard-liners circling their wagons against the rising tide of popular outrage and the dissenters auguring a new and not-so-Silent Majority.

AND –

With the news that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has handed in a report declaring the National Security Agency’s meta-data dragnet flat out illegal it is clear that Edward Snowden’s revelations have badly split a political class that was once pretty much united in its fulsome support for the national security status quo. This comes on the heels of a new poll that shows the majority of Americans oppose the NSA’s data dragnet – with an even larger majority contending that the main danger to their welfare is their own government.

AND –

We saw this Janus-faced persona in Obama’s mien as he campaigned against the Bush administration’s overreach in the Middle East – and then tried to pull a fast one in Syria, a scheme nixed by an outbreak of popular outrage. We saw it as he looked us straight in the eye and told us his is the most transparent administration in modern times – and then did nothing when his Director of National Intelligence denied collecting data on American citizens and was exposed as a liar practically the next day.

Power as we have been made so painfully aware of in the era after “the day that changed everything” is corrosive and corrupting, it can be said that only the worst are attracted to it. Obama’s defense of the ongoing disemboweling of the Constitution shows that power will do everything to not only erect systems of totalitarianism to protect it and those who finance the corrupt politicians make the laws but that will destroy whatever vestiges of the America that existed on September 10, 2001 to ensure that it is never threatened by the rabble.

The most damning part of our rapidly collapsing society is that the same ‘liberals’ who decried all of the abuses of Bush and Cheney in a full-throated roar are now lining up behind Obama as he continues to lead the march to the gates of Hell itself.