Obama's policy on Bush's crimes is how Kavanaugh got to the Supreme Court

[d_r]

The reality is that a very substantial fraction of the American public want an autocratic, imperialistic, xenophobic president. Trump won the last election, and had almost 50% of the popular vote. A centrist Democrat who is a fundamentally decent person but center-right on many issues is just about the best we can expect to get, and possibly better than this country deserves.

[moortaktheundea]

Or he chose not to prosecute those involved in crimes against humanity, a list that included Kavanaugh. It is way harder to sit on the Supreme Court if you are in federal prison.

[moortaktheundea]

Here’s the thing, no one is calling for those people to be in prison because they are political enemies. We are calling for it because they committed crimes against humanity. Take your favorite war criminal or person who oversaw genocide, should they escape justice simply because their predecessor was democratically elected and the country is too powerful to invade easily?

[zathras]

@milliefink

I can’t see much discussion being prompted by a comment that’s larded with (by my count) 15 questions.

Those questions all seem to be rhetorical questions, so doesn’t each and every one of them directly imply a statement? So how is the comment any different from a comment that contains 15 statements instead of 15 questions? Can’t it be answered the same way?
Are you trying to say that the long list of questions is annoying to read? If so, you might be right, but doesn’t that only get really bad after the tenth question?

@thatspecial

Doesn’t the FBI and other agencies go after alleged criminals, and they do so no mater what the sitting president says about it?

That is probably true, but Obama still had the right to voice his own opinion. Of the three choices “I think they should be prosecuted”, “It is not my place to decide whether they should be prosecuted”, “We should not prosecute but focus on the future”, he picked one.

Now, if no prosecution is happening, Bush’s successor could still have fixed the law - apparently, US law does not clearly and effectively prohibit presidents from ordering people to be arbitrarily detained and tortured anywhere on the planet. Obama could have tried to fix that, even without prosecuting Bush.
The law seems to also give presidents the ability to order attacks on independent countries without any justification whatsoever, and Obama didn’t see fit to try to fix that, either.

And of course, I don’t believe that Obama didn’t have a choice on Guantanamo. That torture camp was opened without Congress passing a special law, so obstruction by Congress is not a sufficient excuse for not closing it immediately.

@Ratel

You’re right. Instead we should normalize the idea that once you get into power you can commit any crime you want and know that there will never be any consequences.

Worse yet, I think what Obama normalized is not the idea that people in power don’t answer for their crimes, but that the war crimes of torture and aggression are not crimes but political opinions.

[milliefink]

@zathras

Are you trying to say that the long list of questions is annoying to read? If so, you might be right, but doesn’t that only get really bad after the tenth question?

[Wanderfound]

@Boundegar

And what about her emails?

[Glaurung]

@gracchus

Obama was operating under assumptions concerning comity and respect and civility that hadn’t been so explicitly and gleefully thrown out the window by the Cheney Regency.

One of the defining features of a functioning democracy is that parties come into and go out of power. So it behooves all parties to behave towards the minority party today as they will wish themselves to be treated in a few years time. Democrats regard this as a feature. Since oh, around the mid 90’s, the Republican party has regarded it as a bug.

It is taking the Democratic party a phenomenally long time to figure out that the Republicans are no longer playing by the rules, and change their behaviour accordingly.

[Shuck]

I do wonder what would have happened if Obama even tried it, though. I mean, look at the conservative backlash, the absolute unhinged frothing they did, over Obama when he didn’t rock the boat or even really make many departures from the Bush administration.

@anon41977465

so maybe he thought, damn if I do the right thing and throw all these white guys in jail a bunch of racists are gonne freak out and drag the country to hell

Yeah, they were doing that anyways, even at the time - the Republican party turning into the Tea Party. I do wonder how much worse things could have been had Obama pushed in that direction - would we have gotten a faster, more extensive move to Trumpism?

@Ratel

fascist takeover of the United States

I wonder if, had Obama actually been even the slightest bit radical, whether there would have been a less piecemeal fascist takeover. The Republicans were (and still haven’t finished) sliding towards Trumpism, but largely started after he showed his strategies worked by getting elected. I suspect the Republican party would have gone full fascist during Obama’s term had he rocked the boat. I don’t know if that would have been worse or better in the long run, though, in terms of fighting them.

@Glaurung

One of the defining features of a functioning democracy is that parties come into and go out of power. So it behooves all parties to behave towards the minority party today as they will wish themselves to be treated in a few years time.

Plus, one doesn’t want to give the impression that one is persecuting one’s political enemies (even when one is actually just prosecuting bastards). I also get the feeling that being removed from power is seen, post-Nixon, as the ultimate punishment anyways - which really doesn’t work when it’s individuals scattered across a whole party and they’ve been “removed from power” only by having lost an election…

[Ratel]

Let me save all the apologists some time: if we ever try to do anything, a bunch of nasty racists will get angry, and boy are those guys scary, so we mustn’t ever do anything. Q.E.D.

[Lexicat]

Note sure where you are from, but, for example, obstruction of justice, and accepting influence from foreign governments, are high crimes & misdemeanors in the impeachable sense in the US.

[tachin1]

@Roy_Brander

Hope because you realize that the end of torture, slavery, capital punishment, judicial maiming, and so on, progressing today towards acceptance of all types of people of every background and nature as people with rights – are all part of a great trend in human affairs that’s been continuing for centuries, across many nations and all political persuasions;

@Roy_Brander

And perhaps serenity when you reflect that the Good Guys are winning over the long run,

This is true and I would hope that those people who live in fear of modernity would realize this, but let’s not get carried away, things are better because people have made them better, in the long view this is as useful to people in power as it is for the average person on the street, it can be and indeed is being used for evil.
Because things aren’t so bad, people can get away with putting kids in cages and lying about the most trivial things.

The sad truth is that because global warming hasn’t been dealt with, things are going to get worse, maybe they’ll get better after that, but not without direct concerted action.

[Wanderfound]

@Lexicat

Note sure where you are from, but, for example, obstruction of justice, and accepting influence from foreign governments, are high crimes & misdemeanors in the impeachable sense in the US.

Violating the emoluments clause would also count. There have been solid grounds for impeaching Trump from the day he took office.

(edit: and I just noticed that you’d already covered that in your second link…)

Not that it matters, however. He’s never going to be impeached.

[iquitos46]

I’ve already voted and I’m willing to do so several more time just to keep the republicans paranoid

[anon86154871]

On what planet does this make sense? Yeah, HRC mind-controlled Republican primary voters into picking the overtly sexist and racist candidate, Republicans have no agency, part 9002.

[anon62577920]

It’s almost like… just because Trump is bad… that doesn’t mean Obama was good?! Next someone will be telling me that killing children with robots creates more terrorism than it solves!

[Wanderfound]

@anon86154871

On what planet does this make sense?

This one.

How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately "elevated" Donald Trump with...

The memo, which was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, outlined “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.”

The document stated, “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”

It continued, “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”

The memo articulated a three-point strategy. Point 1 called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”

At the time, there were more than a dozen Republican presidential candidates. The “variety of candidates is a positive here,” the Clinton campaign said.

“Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right,” the memo noted.

“In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” the Clinton campaign wrote.

As examples of these “pied piper” candidates, the memo named Donald Trump — as well as Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the Clinton campaign concluded.

[philbin1]

Brett Kavanaugh realizing that he has, indeed, gotten away with everything.

[anon86154871]

There’s a whole lot of missing links in between a strategy letter and the votes of thousands of primary voters, you have to be on some Soros Controls CNN shit if you think that letter had any material bearing on the outcome of the Repiblican Primary.

[anon86154871]

And: boy, am I shocked that Salon is joining the Wikileaks and Intercept ass-covering parade, it’s not like they were publishing inane horseshit alongside the other Berniebro Overton Brigaders or anything…

[kiki]

Obama kept making gestures of conciliation towards the other side, but that other side he was dealing with wants complete victory and taking no prisoners. There isn’t any middle ground in American politics anymore. So it is a bit maddening that the left won’t take the fight to Republicans when they have the power and the ability to do that, and when there’s obvious criminality to go after. But that was not Obama’s style. And maybe he was right to not take up that fight, given that you’ve only got so much time in office and so much political capital to spend. But it still rankles me that torturers got off scott free. Nobody was shamed, nobody was demoted or fired, and nobody was indicted.