State Dept launches 'Free the Press' campaign while DOJ asks Supreme Court to force NYT's James Risen to jail

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The left hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

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Can’t try to free them until they are jailed. Just one agency helping another.

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This government is more corrupt that than the Bush administration. I an stunned by how Americans are viciously attacked by a government that should be protecting them. Now we lose our freedom to speak and freedoms of the press. This might be the darkest time for Americans in one hundred years.

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Woho! Slow down bro!

What about McCarthyism? or Nixon?!

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This has to bee any journalists wet dream… The disconnect is really astounding.

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McCarthyism only went on for 6 years - we’re in at least year 14 of this progression. And Nixon at least had the grace to resign, and before that managed to pass the Clean Air Act, create the EPA, and push for universal health insurance.

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if the Justice Department succeeds “it could place President Barack Obama in the awkward position of presiding over the jailing of a journalist in an administration the president has vowed to make the most transparent in history.”

I am not sure the administration would consider that awkward at all. Has the President shown any signs of discomfort?

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I’m afraid the ‘government’ and the ‘administration’ have to be different words with different meanings if you’re going to care that much about what you’re talking about while being coherent and convincing.

The government is constant. Administrations change. Not recognizing that difference will lead to a lot of unnecessary heat and light.

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The administration controls in large part the workings of the government. Slapping in three words: “This government is more corrupt that than it was under the Bush administration” fixes the statement for people who want to be pedantic. If you are utterly incapable of using a tiny smidgen of inference to figure out the blatantly obvious meanings, maybe quickly written internet discussion boards are not for you. His meaning was clear. Thanks for adding nothing useful to the conversation.

If you have an actual useful thought that is on topic, maybe you should make it?

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Oh, was -I- feeling pedantic?

Anyhow. I guess my point that Bush was corrupt independantly, and Obama is crooked in his own way, and the government a third way. Maybe my nuance was lost,

Thanks for the friendly question!! and for furthering the conversation!!

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I would say you’re both right. The administrations were both corrupt, but the government (NSA), that largely flies independent, although with approval from the administration, is corrupt also.

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In the video, Jenn Psaki has a sort of Madonna “What It Feels Like For a Girl” look going on. I bet she’d like to gun her Camaro over some of those guys.

The Obama admin. has some areas where they are truly horrible, esp. when it comes to quashing/arresting whistleblowers, surveillance, torture by proxy, indefinite detention, and extra-judicial execution. Those are all very, very serious issues, and I don’t condone any of those things.

The Bush admin opened the floodgates for the administration’s expanding unconstitutional powers. Critics on the left were very clear to say that once the Bush admin. got away with taking these powers that no administration would be likely to let them go, and here we see just that happening. On many fronts the Congress has actually supported or even actively blocked the Obama admin from rectifying them (blocking the end of indefinite detention, supporting surveillance, quashing whistleblowers, etc.).

The Obama admin has overturned a few terrible policies (direct condoning of torture, stem cells, institutionally legalized prejudice, unfairly favoring religious organizations over secular, overt sanctioning of anti-gay policies, gutting environmental protections, deranged economic policies, etc.), and managed to get the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan sorted out, but hasn’t undone the epic, epic, mind-bogglingly destructive legacy he inherited, or done enough.

I do believe Bush is the worst president we’ve had in recent history, far worse than Reagan or Nixon, for the sheer number of horrible precedents he set, his lawlessness, and the sheer scale of damage he did on so many fronts, as well as the sheer rank incompetence and cronyism that marked ever part of his admin.

The Obama admin is corrupt, but the breadth and scale the Bush admin was far more corrupt, and corrupting.

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So you see significant changes in government from one administration to the next?

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Wilson was clearly a much greater threat than either of those n00bs.

I’m sure that they do not intend to put him in jail… They are just trying to scare him into leaving the country so that they can take him out with a drone.

Going further - is there anyone out there who even buys that line of BS anymore? Or do people still honestly act like “the president” and “the administration” are two separate entities?

At what point in the current administration will “It’s all Bush’s fault” cease to be the weak, easily disproved go-to rebuttal for the overwhelming failures and lies of the asses in seats at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?

For an administration that brooked no entertaining of a political status quo, it’s nothing but failure, dismissal and evasions when confronted with a fact. On the topic of “transparent administrations”, I’m sure there’s a convoluted way of explaining how the record levels of FOIA denials, spying and whistleblower prosecutions can be laid at that dim bulb Bush II, but past inhabitants of that office were a little more aware of the concept of passing the buck.

I was responding to the claim that the Obama admin was more corrupt than the Bush admin. I gave my reasons why I disagreed, and gave my reasons why the corrupting influence of the Bush admin was especially pernicious since it was hard to undo.

I didn’t attempt to rebut the failures of the Obama admin., so your question is nonsense.