Glenn Greenwald’s (Below-Quoted) Phrase Synopsizes President Obama’s (Arguably) Impeachment-Deserving Contribution to the Dismantling of the First and Fourth Amendments

© 2013 Peter Free

 

30 May 2013

 

 

As I wrote previously — public cowardice is pounding American liberties into submission

 

Just 10 days ago:

 

 

Pundits (of one political stripe or another) repeatedly excuse this president and the last one by pretending to knowledgeably find an inescapable “tension” between the Constitution’s liberty-protections and our Government’s obligation to keep us safe from ourselves and everybody else.

 

The word’s intentionally handwringing nuance is supposed to impress us with the Executive Branch’s difficult course in keeping our babies safe from the Running Dogs of Terrorism — to distort the propaganda phrase popularized by China’s Chairman Mao, decades ago.

 

But that assumed nuance is crap.

 

Any moron can see that using Absolute Secrecy as a shield against any inquiry (at all) into Government’s too frequently indulged plethora of evils obliterates the American Constitution.

 

 

Former constitutional lawyer, Glenn Greenwald, frequently wields Freedom’s Cudgel

 

His essays are long, but his insights apt.

 

Today, he summed President Obama’s liberty-defeating continuation of President George W. Bush’s powerful steps in the same direction:

 

 

James Comey becomes just the latest symbol of the Obama legacy: normalizing what was very recently viewed as radical.

 

© 2013 Glenn Greenwald, Obama’s new FBI chief approved Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme, The Guardian (30 May 2013)

 

 

In evidentiary support

 

Greenwald pointed out that political liberals had been outraged (in 2005), when the New York Times revealed that the Bush II Administration had been warrantlessly tapping Americans’ wireless communications for years:

 

 

First, both the Bush DOJ [Department of Justice] and . . . Obama DOJ successfully convinced obsequious federal courts that the eavesdropping program was so secretive that national security would be harmed if courts were to adjudicate its legality . . . .

 

 

Second, the Bush DOJ's most senior lawyers –

 

 

Attorney General John Ashcroft,

 

Deputy Attorney General James Comey

 

and

 

OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] chief Jack Goldsmith –

 

 

approved a legal memorandum in 2004 endorsing radical executive power theories and warped statutory interpretations,

 

 

concluding that the Bush NSA [National Security Agency] warrantless eavesdropping program was legal, thus making it more difficult to prosecute the Bush officials who ordered it . . . .

 

 

It was announced yesterday that this very same James Comey –

 

 

who as Bush's Deputy Attorney General authorized the once-very-controversial, patently illegal Bush NSA eavesdropping program –

 

 

is President Obama's choice to be the new Director of the FBI.

 

 

© 2013 Glenn Greenwald, Obama’s new FBI chief approved Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme, The Guardian (30 May 2013) (paragraph split and reformatted for better online readability)

 

 

Why does this matter? — Slowly raising the temperature of water to boiling successfully kills the unaware frog

 

One infuriating aspect of the human condition is our blatant predilection for being irrationally unobjective.

 

Political partisanship in the United States conceals truth more often than it reveals it.

 

Liberals were constantly mad at (what they categorized as the) infamous George W. Bush and his allegedly near-Satanic sidekick, Vice President Dick Cheney.

 

Yet, today, this same allegedly progressive crew is virtually silent as President Obama crunches the First and Fourth to pieces — even more emphatically than his Texas predecessor ever did.

 

That is what Greenwald means by the normalization of radicalism.

 

Just as a frog — who would otherwise be perfectly capable of escaping the cooking pot — tolerates the slow rise of water temperature to boiled death — so too is the American public tolerating the evaporation of our fundamental freedoms.

 

 

The moral? — Our excessive fear of terrorism agreeably urinates away the Constitutional constraints on government actions that once most inspiringly made us American

 

My guess, given the complacence of human nature, is that this trend will continue.  To the point that we might as well have left King George the Third in charge.

 

President Obama’s eventual claim to historical memorability will be that he was the first “black” king of the former colonies.

 

This is (of course) ironic, given the implicit African-American slave parallel that he competently manipulated to his political advantage in getting himself elected twice.

  

I am reasonably certain that our politically perspicacious President appreciates the deliciousness of this paradoxical outcome.