Back to you and anybody else; please explain how president Obama wold
have been a great man if everything people wanted him to do should
have been a Executive Order, yet when he can’t carry these things out
(or he’s blocked from carrying them out by members of his own party
and by the GOP), he’s now a ‘do-nothing’ pariah?
What do my views on whether or not Obama has lived up to expectations/done absolutely everything I wanted him to do have to do with whether or not it’s valuable to the American people and American democracy to disclose evidence of government overreach and privacy violations?
Personally, I’m actually pretty pragmatic on Obama and always have been. I’ve been disappointed with some of the stuff he’s done. Pretty happy with other stuff. Realize that there’s stuff his hands are tied on politically and I realize that there’s stuff we COMPLETELY disagree on and some of that stuff bothers me a lot. I don’t think he’s evil and I don’t think he’s the Messiah. I think he’s an imperfect politician working in the constraints a really imperfect system.
But none of that is particularly relevant to what I think about the Snowden leaks – or, at least, it’s irrelevant in the terms that you’re framing it in. Again, I feel like you’re setting up a scenario where I have Choice A) Love everything Obama does, hate everything conservatives do, and thus must hate Snowden or B) Hate everything Obama does, love what conservatives do, and thus must love Snowden. And those are very, very, very far from being my only choices.
Is Snowden doing this because he cares about America, or just because
he’s bored/disgruntled?
I don’t really give a shit. I care about the content of the leaks and, from where I sit, disclosing this information is good for us and important.
Is Snowden really a ‘progressive’ or just a false-flag right-winger
out to make things worse for progressive Americans?
Again, Snowden’s politics don’t particularly matter to me. And if by “making things worse for progessives” you mean “making a government that’s currently lead by a Democrat look bad”, well I don’t particularly give a shit about that, either. Frankly, I think it makes progressives look better if we can criticize politicians who on “our side”, rather than creating an us vs. them dichotomy. Just because Obama and I agree that GLBT people should have full civil rights and that a social safety net is a good thing doesn’t mean that I have to agree with him on everything and it definitely doesn’t mean that it’s detrimental to me to have some serious critique happen when he supports stuff that’s fucked up.
Is Snowden concerned about his nation’s security, or looking to
corrupt it for kicks?
It doesn’t really matter what Snowden wants to do at this point. It matters what we do with the information.
Does Snowden like and respect government and believes that it can help
people, or is he the kind of extremist (right or left) that believes
government should be destroyed, but without providing an alternative?
And again, Snowden’s power was in disclosure. What we do with the information is up to us. Not him.
