The following are excerpts from an interview of constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley by John Cusack. Turley brings up some profound considerations we as voting citizens should be reckoning with.
Well, first of all, there's a great desire of many people to relieve themselves of the obligation to vote on principle. It's a classic rationalization that liberals have been known to use recently, but not just liberals. The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They've convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse. So even with 11 percent of the public supporting Congress most incumbents will be returned to Congress. They have so structured and defined the question that people no longer look at the actual principles and instead vote on this false dichotomy.
Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that's not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate.
This is nothing new, of course for civil libertarians who have always been left behind at the altar in elections. We've always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. We're used to politicians lying to us. And President Obama lied to us. There's no way around that. He promised various things and promptly abandoned those principles.
So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter. With President Obama they have a president who went to the CIA soon after he was elected and promised CIA employees that they would not be investigated or prosecuted for torture, even though he admitted that waterboarding was torture.
snip
That was the truly other-worldly moment of the speech. He [Eric Holder] went to, Northwestern Law School (my alma mater), and stood there and articulated the most authoritarian policy that a government can have: the right to unilaterally kill its citizens without any court order or review. The response from the audience was applause. Citizens applauding an Attorney General who just described how the President was claiming the right to kill any of them on his sole inherent authority.
snip
But the thing about the Obama administration is that it is far more premeditated and sophisticated in claiming authoritarian powers. Bush tended to shoot from the hip — he tended to do these things largely on the edges. In contrast, Obama has openly embraced these powers and created formal measures, an actual process for killing US citizens. He has used the terminology of the law to seek to legitimate an extrajudicial killing.
snip
The greatest problem is what it has done to us and what our relative silence signifies. Liberals and civil libertarians have lost their own credibility, their own moral standing, with the support of President Obama. For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That's where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation.
Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They're both violations of international law. Notably, when the Spanish moved to investigate our torture program, we now know that the Obama administration threatened the Spanish courts and the Spanish government that they better not enforce the treaty against the US This was a real threat to the Administration because these treaties allow other nations to step forward when another nation refuses to uphold the treaty. If a government does not investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, then other countries have the right to do so. That rule was, again, of our own creation. With other leading national we have long asserted the right to prosecute people in other countries who are shielded or protected by their own countries.
snip
Well, the biggest problem is that when the administration was fishing around for some way to justify not doing the right thing and not prosecuting torture, they finally released a document that said that CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were "just following orders," but particularly CIA personnel.
The reason Obama promised them that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the US under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg. Just think of the implications: other countries that are accused of torture can shield their people and say, "Yeah, this guy was a torturer. This guy ordered a war crime. But they were all just following orders. And the guy that gave them the order, he's dead." It is the classic defense of war criminals. Now it is a viable defense again because of the Obama administration.
snip
The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don't hear the word "torture."
They hear "enhanced interrogation." They don't hear much about the treaties. They don't hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law.
snip
Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.
snip
The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, "Enough." And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, "Enough. We're not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We're going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty.
snip
One of the things I teach in my constitutional class is that there is a need for what's called a bright-line rule. That is, the value for bright-line rules is that they structure relations between the branches, between the government and citizens. Bright-line rules protect freedom and liberty. Those people that try to eliminate bright-line rules quickly find themselves on a slippery slope. The Obama administration, with the Bush administration, began by denying rights to people at Guantanamo Bay.
And then they started to deny rights of foreigners who they accused of being terrorists. And eventually, just recently, they started denying rights to citizens and saying that they could kill citizens without any court order or review. It is the fulfillment of what is the nightmare of civil liberties. They crossed that bright line. Now they're bringing these same abuses to US citizens and changing how we relate to our government. In the end, we have this huge apparatus of the legal system, this huge court system, and all of it has become discretionary because the president can go ahead and kill US citizens if he feels that it's simply inconvenient or impractical to bring them to justice.
snip
If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we'd be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That's the only thing I can think of.
snip
Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what's left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It's not enough to say, "Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System."
snip
I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it's unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don't create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.[cross-posted on correntewire and sacramento for democracy]
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Apparently Obama agrees with you. The Maureen Dowd column in the NY Times today ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-playing-now-hail-to-us-chiefs.html ) quotes Obama as saying the fault of all he problems he has had in turning the country around lies not with him, but with the American public. Perhaps he is right. Although the police violence and brutality that smashed the peaceful Occupy movement was coordinated from the White House it is quite evident that the citizenry did not respond with mass outcries that their basic rights to protest were violated. The public merely drew back and permitted the Constitutional violation as it did for the violations you mentioned. When the public massively stands up to the unacceptable behavior of a rapidly coalescing police state and starts screaming en mass that the government is acting illegally, perhaps Obama might think twice about trashing democracy. Otherwise, it's obvious government by the people is a sham anyway.
Jan, haven't read Dowd in a long time. Will check it out. Thanks.
Dr. Scott Peck in his powerful book "People of the Lie" asserts that evil is "laziness to the nth degree".
Do I think Obama is morally lazy? To the nth degree!!! I don't even think he is terribly bright. I think he is terribly amoral and that made him so very useful to the oligarchy who needed someone to talk a talk in opposition to the walk he opportunistically and amorally was willing to walk FOR THEM NOT US AND IS STILL WALKING IT. Probably lots of Obamas out there willing to sell out. Obama was the "chosen one".
The vast majority of the American citizenry -- are they lazy to the nth degree? Absolutely. They have lost their sense of citizen identity. They are consumers of crap and consumers of media propaganda and of a celebrity cult. They run to plug into that cult and are really high on it, especially this week.
Do you know that for this election round Obama went out and brought the Hispanic answer to Oprah to his convention? When a formula works for Obama, he uses it!! Forget all those deportations, trust the maternal Hispanic Oprah who LIKES Obama and his great personality. Win/win for her and her ratings! Forget the sirens of cognitive dissonance about what he has actually done TO not for this country. Trust the media hype and all those corporate media amoral pretending to be so righteous talking heads. MSNBC is for Obama what Fox news was for Bush. Crony advertising.
80 million were ready to roll up their sleeves when the Obama they thought they had voted in took office, but when he more and more turned out to be the anti-MLK, the anti-second coming, the continuer of Bush monstrousness and an even bigger and more shameless war criminal and the best friend forever to economic raping corporations and banks, they shrugged and sat down and resumed watching Seinfeld or L&O or whatever.
After 8 years of Bush you would think there would have been a stronger will to save the country. Granted, it was a cruel and surreal joke on all of us to have Obama turn out to be the ever relentless Energizer Bunny of betrayal. Of constitution-gutting. Granted, African American and smooth-talking Obama was cut so much slack to be sure he really wasn't what was promised (how could he have promised so much the opposite?), he ended up strangling democracy with it.
Unbelievably he is still being given more slack for another 4 years. He can finish off the job with the new measure of slack. Took a Dem Trojan Horse to really lock in fascism so quickly and mendaciously into our government.
Will-less citizenry as well as so many profoundly obtuse. Duh, political parties and corporations and media tell us we only have two corrupt choices. Two wings of one corporate-captured party running US government. Only way to WIN.
When citizens are encouraged to go for a third option that represents integrity and empathy and REAL democracy they cry out, "What are you thinking? We only want to go with a "winner"!" Serve up a winner to us on a silver platter. Fight for real democracy? Are you serious?
What I said. Lazy to the nth degree. Who cares what the reality is? Lazy to the nth degree. Sure, they want to pretend they are doing the RIGHT thing, the easiest and softest way. But, not to actually have to do it.
Torture? The citizens don't seem to give a god d*mn, as long as it is not them directly. They don't give a serious sh*t. Same as innocent people dying abroad. Same as 2.3 million people condemned to prison in this country. 1/3 of our country living in poverty.
And when 5000 political performers and 15,000 media reps put on a big fat sentimental and shallowly jingoistic kabuki circus for three days in Charlotte, NC, (so very similar in style and shallow substance to the one in Tampa) manufacturing empty pep-rally substanceless cotton candy out of 4 years of illegitimate war violence and economic behind closed doors fraud and extortion and theft it gives the tv and celebrity cult consuming viewers a real rush of team-spirit and narcissistic exceptionalism.
Stupidly affirming Dem evil is less than Republican evil and that is OKAY. THAT IS THE WAY TO GO? Look at how many lazy Americans with consciences in the deep freeze concur.
How stupid. How lazy. How conscience-less! HOW DOOMING!!!
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report says of Obama, HE IS THE MORE EFFECTIVE EVIL! No argument.
best, libby
Dr. Scott Peck in his powerful book "People of the Lie" asserts that evil is "laziness to the nth degree".
Do I think Obama is morally lazy? To the nth degree!!! I don't even think he is terribly bright. I think he is terribly amoral and that made him so very useful to the oligarchy who needed someone to talk a talk in opposition to the walk he opportunistically and amorally was willing to walk FOR THEM NOT US AND IS STILL WALKING IT. Probably lots of Obamas out there willing to sell out. Obama was the "chosen one".
The vast majority of the American citizenry -- are they lazy to the nth degree? Absolutely. They have lost their sense of citizen identity. They are consumers of crap and consumers of media propaganda and of a celebrity cult. They run to plug into that cult and are really high on it, especially this week.
Do you know that for this election round Obama went out and brought the Hispanic answer to Oprah to his convention? When a formula works for Obama, he uses it!! Forget all those deportations, trust the maternal Hispanic Oprah who LIKES Obama and his great personality. Win/win for her and her ratings! Forget the sirens of cognitive dissonance about what he has actually done TO not for this country. Trust the media hype and all those corporate media amoral pretending to be so righteous talking heads. MSNBC is for Obama what Fox news was for Bush. Crony advertising.
80 million were ready to roll up their sleeves when the Obama they thought they had voted in took office, but when he more and more turned out to be the anti-MLK, the anti-second coming, the continuer of Bush monstrousness and an even bigger and more shameless war criminal and the best friend forever to economic raping corporations and banks, they shrugged and sat down and resumed watching Seinfeld or L&O or whatever.
After 8 years of Bush you would think there would have been a stronger will to save the country. Granted, it was a cruel and surreal joke on all of us to have Obama turn out to be the ever relentless Energizer Bunny of betrayal. Of constitution-gutting. Granted, African American and smooth-talking Obama was cut so much slack to be sure he really wasn't what was promised (how could he have promised so much the opposite?), he ended up strangling democracy with it.
Unbelievably he is still being given more slack for another 4 years. He can finish off the job with the new measure of slack. Took a Dem Trojan Horse to really lock in fascism so quickly and mendaciously into our government.
Will-less citizenry as well as so many profoundly obtuse. Duh, political parties and corporations and media tell us we only have two corrupt choices. Two wings of one corporate-captured party running US government. Only way to WIN.
When citizens are encouraged to go for a third option that represents integrity and empathy and REAL democracy they cry out, "What are you thinking? We only want to go with a "winner"!" Serve up a winner to us on a silver platter. Fight for real democracy? Are you serious?
What I said. Lazy to the nth degree. Who cares what the reality is? Lazy to the nth degree. Sure, they want to pretend they are doing the RIGHT thing, the easiest and softest way. But, not to actually have to do it.
Torture? The citizens don't seem to give a god d*mn, as long as it is not them directly. They don't give a serious sh*t. Same as innocent people dying abroad. Same as 2.3 million people condemned to prison in this country. 1/3 of our country living in poverty.
And when 5000 political performers and 15,000 media reps put on a big fat sentimental and shallowly jingoistic kabuki circus for three days in Charlotte, NC, (so very similar in style and shallow substance to the one in Tampa) manufacturing empty pep-rally substanceless cotton candy out of 4 years of illegitimate war violence and economic behind closed doors fraud and extortion and theft it gives the tv and celebrity cult consuming viewers a real rush of team-spirit and narcissistic exceptionalism.
Stupidly affirming Dem evil is less than Republican evil and that is OKAY. THAT IS THE WAY TO GO? Look at how many lazy Americans with consciences in the deep freeze concur.
How stupid. How lazy. How conscience-less! HOW DOOMING!!!
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report says of Obama, HE IS THE MORE EFFECTIVE EVIL! No argument.
best, libby
Thanks, toritto. Turley has a really calming and civilized and astute take on it all.
Which tone I just negated with my angry and bitter comment about Obama and citizens to Jan. Sigh.
Appreciate you stopping by and commenting! best, libby
Which tone I just negated with my angry and bitter comment about Obama and citizens to Jan. Sigh.
Appreciate you stopping by and commenting! best, libby
there are some useful points, here.
but talk doesn't matter much, and there is almost nothing you can do, because ordinary citizens were frozen out of the decision making process with the adoption of the consitution.
it has to be changed, before anything can be accomplished.
but talk doesn't matter much, and there is almost nothing you can do, because ordinary citizens were frozen out of the decision making process with the adoption of the consitution.
it has to be changed, before anything can be accomplished.
It was largely interference by the Obama administration that led Baltasar Garzon, the crusading Spanish judge who indicted ex-Chilean dictator Pinochet, to be removed from judiciary. After working with one of Pinochet's torture victims for five years, that's something I can never forgive him for.
Great post. People need to be constantly reminded that when they vote for a candidate they are endorsing his policies.
Great post. People need to be constantly reminded that when they vote for a candidate they are endorsing his policies.
One of the most obvious policies of the Obama regime is that criminal action by national leaders is nonpunishable thereby paving the way for his own future.
What may seem clever and profitable for the powerful people currently in charge in their overall policies of dismantling democracy in general and disposing those elements of government that favored health, security, decent general wealth and all those elements that procured some sort of basic good life for the general populace in order to line their pockets so destroys the basis for sensible government that their own fortunes will disintegrate along with everything else.
What may seem clever and profitable for the powerful people currently in charge in their overall policies of dismantling democracy in general and disposing those elements of government that favored health, security, decent general wealth and all those elements that procured some sort of basic good life for the general populace in order to line their pockets so destroys the basis for sensible government that their own fortunes will disintegrate along with everything else.
Thank you, Libby, as always for the information and the insight. With you, Jan Sand, and Dr. Bramhall on the same blog, one can never go wrong. R
You might want to change it to "Libby-Progressive."
As some here on OS already know, I probably go a step or two further than is usual these days.
I watch in amazement as once again the argument is about which individuals (or political parties) will best serve the interests of the people. Is everyone blind? Can no one see that the answer is "None of them"?
How do I go about explaining that when the people select a few career politicians, who MUST give priority to their political party and its financial supporters, you CANNOT expect them to serve YOUR interests first - if at all?
Look folks, this has now been tried for hundreds of years in the US. It's been tried in a number of other nations also. It doesn't work in our best interests. It has NEVER worked in our best interests. It WILL never work in our best interests. Why? Easy one: Human beings are all too human, that's why. And we've got a system that rewards greed, graft, corruption, elitism, and all that sort of thing. The politicians, while working against the the interests of the electorate and for the interests of the eliete, can get rich by doing so. And politicians are human enough to like that idea.
What, in this system, will prevent them from selling out their citizens, when all of them become, as they have now, corrupt? What, in this system, can the citizens do to call "their" representatives to account? You know the answer to that as well as I do - nothing. There is no way to effectively deter politicians from doing as they please once handed that decision-making authority over the electorate. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. It can't be done. We certainly know that merely changing one set of them for another set of similar masters, doesn't really change anything. We KNOW that. We've done that over and over. Look at the results. Does that look good to you?
Surely it is as plain as the nose on your face that this is so. You'd have to live on another planet not to have noticed this. Do you never say to yourself, "Damn, this system sucks! - big time?"
So how come we all still support such a screwed up system? Are we all masochists? Do we like getting fucked over? Can we not devise a better system than this?
I think we can. I think that we must. I think that we will not ever be able to look our children and grandchildren in the face if this is the best that we can leave to them. Think about it, folks.....
IS THIS REALLY THE BEST THAT WE CAN DO?!
.
I watch in amazement as once again the argument is about which individuals (or political parties) will best serve the interests of the people. Is everyone blind? Can no one see that the answer is "None of them"?
How do I go about explaining that when the people select a few career politicians, who MUST give priority to their political party and its financial supporters, you CANNOT expect them to serve YOUR interests first - if at all?
Look folks, this has now been tried for hundreds of years in the US. It's been tried in a number of other nations also. It doesn't work in our best interests. It has NEVER worked in our best interests. It WILL never work in our best interests. Why? Easy one: Human beings are all too human, that's why. And we've got a system that rewards greed, graft, corruption, elitism, and all that sort of thing. The politicians, while working against the the interests of the electorate and for the interests of the eliete, can get rich by doing so. And politicians are human enough to like that idea.
What, in this system, will prevent them from selling out their citizens, when all of them become, as they have now, corrupt? What, in this system, can the citizens do to call "their" representatives to account? You know the answer to that as well as I do - nothing. There is no way to effectively deter politicians from doing as they please once handed that decision-making authority over the electorate. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. It can't be done. We certainly know that merely changing one set of them for another set of similar masters, doesn't really change anything. We KNOW that. We've done that over and over. Look at the results. Does that look good to you?
Surely it is as plain as the nose on your face that this is so. You'd have to live on another planet not to have noticed this. Do you never say to yourself, "Damn, this system sucks! - big time?"
So how come we all still support such a screwed up system? Are we all masochists? Do we like getting fucked over? Can we not devise a better system than this?
I think we can. I think that we must. I think that we will not ever be able to look our children and grandchildren in the face if this is the best that we can leave to them. Think about it, folks.....
IS THIS REALLY THE BEST THAT WE CAN DO?!
.
All the leaders of the USA in recent history are terribly proud of how free the country is and they vigorously invade all sorts of countries that, oddly, seem to have a lot of oil or other interesting minerals, but that's of no real interest because they lack freedom and the USA is vigorously active in spreading freedom. The only drawback for this generosity, unfortunately, is that their definition of freedom coincides with that in the song "freedom is another word for nothing left to lose".
@Jan,
It seems that "Freedom", to the US, means the US is "Free" to do as it pleases and those countries are "Free" to do as they're told." This might make Bush's claim that others are jealous of America's "Freedom", actually make sense!
.
It seems that "Freedom", to the US, means the US is "Free" to do as it pleases and those countries are "Free" to do as they're told." This might make Bush's claim that others are jealous of America's "Freedom", actually make sense!
.
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