NOT VERY GOOD NEWS TO START OFF THE YEAR

This was written by Derrick Kardos. For those of you who constantly point to the good things Obama has sone, here's a wake up call.

It is hard not to like or admire Barack Obama as a person: he is intelligent, eloquent and witty.
SO WHAT.
Obama should be judged on his policies, not his (cult of) personality; his dismal record, not his soaring rhetoric.

Barack Obama drove a stake into the heart of America last night, in the dead of New Year's night: he signed the NDAA into law, effectively taking a massive dump on the Bill of Rights, and flushing it down the toilet.

ACLU.ORG

So it AMAZES me when I see liberals/progressives lapping up and regurgitating propaganda about Ron Paul; 2nd or 3rd hand hearsay about things he MIGHT have done or MIGHT have said DECADES AGO, pictures with shady characters he MIGHT have known.. accusations which, EVEN IF they were true, have NEVER manifested themselves in ANY way, shape, or form in any of his speeches, his votes or his policies within government.

Yet the same time, the same people who recoil in self-righteous terror from photos of Ron Paul standing next to invisible Nazis* have got no problem ignoring the ACTUAL FACTUAL EVIL things BARACK OBAMA HAS indisputably, ACTUALLY, FACTUALLY DONE.

(*because, you know, the guy who wants to END all of our imperialistic wars overseas is of course, the Nazi. http://tinyurl.com/mudthrowinglies)

Take it away, Glenn Greenwald:

"The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — ..himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight..

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific.
So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views.

Progressives would feel much better about themselves, their Party and their candidate if they only had to oppose, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. That’s because the standard GOP candidate agrees with Obama on many of these issues and is even worse on these others, so progressives can feel good about themselves for supporting Obama: his right-wing opponent is a warmonger, a servant to Wall Street, a neocon, a devotee of harsh and racist criminal justice policies, etc. etc. Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are expressly arguing they’d vote for Obama over Paul).
Is it really hard to see why Democrats hate his candidacy and anyone who touts its benefits?"

Thank you, Glenn!
You can read the rest of Glenn's tour-de-force analysis here:
Progressives and Ron Paul Fallacies

SALON.COM

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I have begun to realize not only are Obama's policies very much like Bush's but most Obama supporters are also very much like Bush supporters: blind and idolatrous.

"The election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties"."
-Jonathan Turley.

I'd go further:
from extrajudicial assassination to indefinite imprisonment, from warrantless surveillance to indiscriminate drone bombing to his setting into stone the worst of the worst of Bush-era war policies like torture & secret prisons, and now the NDAA shredding of the Bill of Rights,
no President in the history of America has done more to destroy America than Barack Obama.

oh i know, i know. michelle bachman would be worse.
and ron paul is crazy (<---repeat 1000 times).
and obama's got a lot on his plate! all those atrocities mentioned above weren't his decisions, theyre just things he hasn't gotten to yet!
besides - he's ♥ ♥ Obama! ♥ ♥.

WAKE UP, FOLKS.
THE DREAM IS OVER !