Democrats and Liberals Give Obama a Pass on Closing Gitmo

"I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that"

-President Barack Obama

Liberals disgust me. With 2014 being an election year and the looming announcement from Queen Hillary the Inevitable that she is running for president in 2016 liberals and their beloved Democratic Party are closing ranks and circling the wagons to protect Team Blue Jackass from heretics unwilling to line up and salute the party flag. Obama is now well into his second term and the American torture and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay is still open for business, a pox upon our once great country and one that along with the abominable practices there – namely torture and the prevention from it officially becoming a “death camp” only because the US government is force feeding prisoners who are attempting hunger strikes – continue and will continue because after all, it is an election year and God forbid if the Democrats make it any easier for their more overtly fascist opponents to call them “chicken”. 

Obama ran on closing this monstrous facility and to this day, five and a half years into his second term it has yet to be done. Oh, but the Democrats and the liberals blame those bad, bad Republicans for their ongoing obstructionism and preventing Barry from carrying out his agenda - horseshit! Obama had two years when his party controlled the Congress and the only thing of substance that managed to get accomplished was bailing out the criminals on Wall Street whose bad gambling bets wrecked the economy. Obama could have - and could still close the goddamned wretched place any time that he chooses, after all the Bush-Cheney regime firmly established the American version of the  Führerprinzip or as it is known in The Homeland: the Unitary Executive. This renders moot any Democrat whining that Obama is powerless - he does manage to get a lot done when it comes to unleashing the NSA Stasi against the public and having his ruthless underboss Eric Holder to use the arcane 1917 Espionage Act as a bludgeon to suppress whistleblowers and those who report on them. He also manages to do one hell of a job of conducting extrajudicial assassinations against American citizens, covering up torture and other high crimes of his predecessor and instigating hostilities with a nuclear armed Russia because he was insulted by President Putin.

Obama is far from the helpless, besieged by racists and obstructionists and teabaggers historic leader that he is made out to be and the same liberals who shrieked for Bush and Cheney's heads on pikes for far less than the loathsome Obama regime has pulled are falling into line and shuffling towards the Kool Aid vat just as they always do. Obama gave his much hyped foreign policy speech at West Point where he gave the commencement address to the future corporate cannon fodder of illegal wars of aggression and vowed to close the facility again. The speech was more of the same teleprompter drivel in which Obama laid out the proverbial line of bullshit long enough to fertilize the Sahara with his interventionist rhetoric and defense of that most obscene of concepts that is American exceptionalism. I excerpt the following from the transcript:

Think about it. Our military has no peer. The odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low, and do not come close to the dangers we faced during the Cold War. Meanwhile, our economy remains the most dynamic on Earth, our businesses the most innovative. Each year, we grow more energy independent. From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations.

America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century past, and it will be true for the century to come.

 But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm.

 Russia’s aggression towards former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors.

 AND

I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.

 And that’s why I will continue to push to close Gitmo, because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders. (Applause.) That’s why we’re putting in place new restrictions on how America collects and uses intelligence -- because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we’re conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens. (Applause.) America does not simply stand for stability or the absence of conflict, no matter what the cost; we stand for the more lasting peace that can only come through opportunity and freedom for people everywhere -- which brings me to the fourth and final element of American leadership: our willingness to act on behalf of human dignity.

America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism; it is a matter of national security. Democracies are our closest friends and are far less likely to go to war. Economies based on free and open markets perform better and become markets for our goods. Respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror.

At that point the commanders should have ordered the cadets to break ranks and get out the shovels. I mean for God's sake - can't we even manage to produce coherent bullshit in this country anymore? The neocons howled like dogs being castrated because it just wasn't Hitlerian enough for their tastes but the meat of the speech - on the continuation of US interventionism for vaguely defined humanitarian missions must have made the panties of both warmongering femme fatales Susan Rice and Samantha Powers get wet. Nothing quite sells like sending in the US special ops and hit teams to rescue a couple of hundred of hapless Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Islamists largely empowered by the US destabilization of Africa and the Democrats are at the end of the day as bloodthirsty as their criminal cohorts across the aisle. Hillary will be perfect for the coming wave of American whip ass that will be unleashed for "humanitarian" or "Responsibility to Protect (P2P)" Team America style incursions and nothing could be more pleasing to the party base, fucking hypocrites that they all are.

In my daily online travels I frequent a number of progressive sites where I often voice my opinion in the comments sections for articles and I have noticed an alarming amount of what appear to be long dormant Hillary Clinton sleeper cells being activated. You can always tell these because first off the person making comments is asinine and secondly, many of the accounts show a creation date of 2008 and 2009 with minimal comments over five years until a recent spike of activity. There are also many pieces and articles popping up like toadstools out of piles of cow shit after a morning rain calling for unity behind a “far from perfect” candidate because the Republicans would be much, much worse.

The unenlightened always play to the silly pack of low information types – or much information that is no more than DNC propaganda – with their fear of the GOP war on the rights of some besieged and helpless identity based group. The good thing now is that thanks to the horrific track record of Barack Obama that a lot more people than before do not buy into that two-party hogwash this time around and it is causing a huge problem not only for Democrats but for the entire sham system itself.

Former New York Times foreign correspondent and author Chris Hedges, himself more of a socialist – calm down libertarians, he did sue Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act – called out liberals for the hypocrites that they are shortly after the election of the man of hope and change. From his December 7, 2009 column entitled “Liberals are Useless”:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

 I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

AND

 I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Hedges of course was vilified by the liberal elitists and the Democrats after he nailed them so precisely and now as the cheer-leading and activism begins for the newest great liberal hope Hillary so will any who dare to speak such blasphemy. I have long advocated for an alliance between thinking progressives, leftists, libertarians and principled conservatives against our true enemy - the entire corrupt two party US political system itself and thanks to Obama the choir that I preach to is growing by the day.

Democratic Party Sheep Join the Attacks on Glenn Greenwald

Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award winning investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to make the media rounds as he promotes his new book on the American Stasi  entitled "No Place to Hide:  Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" and has yet to be arrested by the Obama administration. The author is not only loathed by authoritarian liars and scum the likes of departing House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, the always loathsome former head of the Bush-Cheney CIA and NSA Michael Hayden, deranged Congressman Peter King and of course the sitting President of the USA, USA, USA himself but he has now acquired new and formidable foes among the Kool Aid drinkers of the Democratic party.

His unforgivable sin was calling out the queen in waiting Hillary Rodham-Clinton in a recent article for GQ Magazine where he blasted Clinton with both barrels: "Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she's been around forever, the Clinton circle. She's a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She's surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere" followed by "But she's going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist". Both statements are true and of the typical nature of the gut punches that Greenwald regularly delivers to the corrupt establishment and hatred of the man has now like the love of war, the expansion of the surveillance state and Wall Street bailouts become one of those cherished "bipartisan" endeavors that offer proof that despite the collapsing system that ' yes we all can live together after all.

Greenwald has developed a reputation of being more than somewhat of a prick for his refusal to knuckle under and toe the line when being attacked by the establishment and its toadies. He is a combative type which he revels in and as a former corporate litigator prior to becoming a crusading journalist he brings a particular vigor to fighting back, a great example of which was this excellent and hilarious comment on the now retired top Nazi at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade: General Keith Alexander. I excerpt the following from the transcript of an interview that he did with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now last week:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to part two of our special, an extended interview with Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Four weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald returned to the United States for the first time since breaking the Snowden story. He and filmmaker Laura Poitras flew in from Berlin to accept the George Polk Award. Days later, the Pulitzer Prize was given to The Guardian and Washington Post for their coverage of the Snowden leaks. Former NSA director, General Keith Alexander, criticized the Pulitzer Prize committee; he said, quote, "I’m greatly disappointed that we have rewarded those who have put so many lives at risk." I asked Glenn Greenwald to respond.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, first of all, I mean, as a journalist, I consider it sort of an additional prize that somebody like Keith Alexander is so angry at the journalism I’m doing that he’s willing to make those things up in order to discredit it. I mean, the idea of a journalist is that you ought to be adversarial to people like Keith Alexander. And I would be a lot more worried if he liked the reporting that we did and praised it than I am that he’s saying things like that.

But the thing that I think is so important to realize is, you know, if you go back 40 years and look at what was said about Daniel Ellsberg, who most people across the political spectrum now consider to have been heroic and justified and noble in what he did, the same exact things were said about him. In fact, Nixon officials went before Congress and accused him of being a secret Russian spy. They said that he put lives at risk. They said that people were going to die as a result of these disclosures, that he was a traitor, that he was engaged in treason—all of which have been proven to be utter fabrications.

And every single whistleblowing event that has happened since then, including the 2005 NSA story in which someone in the Justice Department told The New York Times about that program, the blowing the whistle on Abu Ghraib and the torture program and the rendition program, what WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning did, this same rhetoric is constantly invoked, which is, if you shine a light on what we in political power are doing in a way that we haven’t authorized you to do, you’re going to have blood on your hands. I mean, there’s an obvious irony to being accused by a U.S. general who served in Iraq, of all places, of having blood on your hands or resulting—causing the death of innocent people. Nobody could ever surpass Keith Alexander and his fellow generals in their ability to do that. But the claim is made all the time, reflexively, without any evidence, because in reality the only thing that has been harmed by the disclosures is not the lives of innocent people, it’s the reputation and credibility of people like Keith Alexander. And so you can understand why they are so interested in demeaning it.

Touché in calling out the ongoing falsehoods that reporting on the revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden endangering lives. It is about time that these fuckers get called out in that it is their own damned wars that are jeopardizing Americans (as well as killing hundreds of thousands of brown-skinned, non-Christian people) it is only too bad that it was on Democracy Now which doesn’t get the attention of a state-corporate ‘news’ show like NBC’s Meet the Press where Greenwald returned as a guest on Sunday morning.

Being interviewed at length by NBC's so-called "justice correspondent" Pete Williams - since the obnoxious power suckler David Gregory either chickened out or was benched by the network to avoid the public spectacle of having his ass handed to him - Greenwald still was hit with the same stale talking points although with more respect now that the book is a hit and additional serious revelations on the NSA are promised to be coming. The interview was in one of those town hall type of formats where random questions were submitted (likely by government sock puppets) which were answered by Greenwald with follow-up from the interviewer. I excerpt from today's Meet the Press transcript:

PETE WILLIAMS: Here are two related questions: Aliz Koletas asks, "What is his response to critics who call him a traitor for helping Snowden?" And Mary Jane Jones says, "How does he feel about making the U.S. a sitting duck to our enemies?"

GLENN GREENWALD: It is always the case that people who bring unwanted disclosure that makes people in power uncomfortable are called traitors. And I'd look at that, really, as a badge of honor. I think it's a testament to the fact that we're doing our job.

PETE WILLIAMS: As you know, the heads of several U.S. intelligence agencies, and also in the U.K., have said that these disclosures have caused potential terrorists to change their method of communication, which makes it harder to detect. What about that? Does that concern you?

GLENN GREENWALD: This claim that these disclosures have helped the terrorists is the same script from which they always read whenever people shine a light on what they're doing. And I hope nobody is willing to accept it on faith, but instead, demands evidence that that has happened, because there actually is none.

While Pete Williams is a typical subservient government hack – his questions dripping with fealty to the masters of the surveillance machine – Greenwald was at least afforded some of the courtesy that he did not get from the always obnoxious Gregory who subjected him to veiled threats last June. The online streaming of the interview that I watched prominently featured banner ads as well as a short commercial for defense contractor Boeing so it is pretty apparent on who it is exactly who butters the bread of Pete Williams.

But while Greenwald does his book promotion tour the liberals that take their marching orders from the stinking carcass of a political party that are the Democrats are revving up the "misogynist" slander machine in preparation for the two year steel cage death match between Queen Hillary the Inevitable and Jeb Bush. The cyber sewer that is Daily Kos is as usual at the tip of the spear and the soldiers of orange or the Kossacks (there seems to be a rather strange communist ring to that) as they endearingly refer to themselves are trashing Greenwald. The "diary" as they refer to such things has been cross-pollinated to other liberal and progressive websites in a tactic used at times to really hammer home a meme. It is encouraging that it is mocked and called out as bullshit on other sites outside of the domain of Markos Molitsas-Zuniga who really is "left" in the same way that Stalin was and some of the responses at least offer a glimmer of hope that the lies of the two party scam are being recognized and rejected by at least a small and vocal percentage of progressives, the type who are able to put aside differences and work with libertarians in the pursuit of a larger attempt to fight a true enemy of freedom such as the surveillance state.

Greenwald will continue to be slimed by both the red and blue sheep in that his opposition to the menace of the very dangerous fascist element that has embedded itself within the US government remains consistent no matter which phony party is officially in power.