Greenwald today sums up just how pathetic things are here in Obama's "last, best hope of Earth."
The president and numerous government officers have been accused, with overwhelming evidence in support, of illegally spying on their own citizens. Congress responds by passing laws to make more spying legal, and retroactively immunize the lawbreakers. The Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, despite the ruling of two lower-court judges that the spying was illegal.
A war-mongering supreme leader, his cronies in supposedly coequal branches of government, and his corporate conspirators have announced that the rule of law does not apply to them. Despite public outcry, nothing has or will ever happen to seriously investigate their crimes. They are untouchable and unaccountable.
If this shit happened in Russia or China, all the conservative blow-hards and liberal enablers would be denouncing it at the top of their lungs. But applying the same standard to America that we apply to the rest of the world is unthinkable.
2 comments:
The phrase "despite public outcry" needs to be struck, otherwise I agree with this piece. That phrase is also the presumptive source of the author's incredulity.
As I was writing I definitely thought that phrase was the weakest link, but stuck with it for reasons that are probably not very good.
There has been and still is popular objection to these policies, but not rising to the intensity of the word "outrage" I suppose. I suspect that two noteworthy factors are a part of that outrage deficit: 1) that individuals don't feel like their objections make a difference and so choose not to invest energy into protest and 2) that people aren't aware of how widespread the objection really is (because popular opinion that differs from elite consensus is generally not reported in the media), thus not realizing how much difference could be made if everyone joined together. Both of those related factors stem from systemic failings of democracy and so are part of the general situation I'm lamenting as well as being a cause of it.
I think that the source of my incredulity is that so many people refuse to see this for what it is... the kind of people who think that Obama represents meaningful change.
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