Great Debate - Has Obama embraced Cheneyism?

There is a fascinating discussion at Anonymous Liberal between A.L. and Glenn Greenwald about Greenwald's thesis that President Obama has embraced Cheneyism with regard to national security and civil liberties.

A.L. argues that at its core, Cheneyism was characterized by lawlessness. Bush and Cheney's posture was that under inherent war powers they claimed existed in Article II of the Constitution, the Executive can do whatever he wants to do as long as he says he's doing it to protect America. Laws be damed.

[S]he argues also that whether you agree with Obama and Eric Holder on policy specifics, the fact is that they are operating within the law and that is the key difference between Obama and Cheney/Bush.

It is certainly true that Obama is continuing many of the Bush administration's policies, but they're the policies from 2008, after the Bush administration's hand had been forced by the Courts or Congress had come to its rescue with legislation. In other words, Obama may not be going to great lengths to voluntarily impose constraints on existing executive authority, but I have not seen any evidence that he has embraced Cheneyism, i.e., that his administration is using highly dubious legal claims to expand executive power. To me, that is a fundamental difference. It is the difference between acting legally and illegally.

Greenwald counters in A.L.s comments section that it doesn't matter what authority Obama cites. If you do what Cheney and Bush did, you're every bit as evil as Cheney and Bush.

The policies themselves were every bit as much defining attributes of Bush/Cheney radicalism as the underlying legal claims. The fact that Obama found better legal arguments to justify the same policies is nice, but it's not much help to those caught up in -- victimized by -- all of that, and it's a huge stretch to say that the same exact policies in Obama's hands are fundamentally different all because the legal theories asserted by his DOJ are (at least for now) different.

There is a lot more and all of it very good. Go check it out.

Truce? What truce?

Keith Olbermann is back from vacation and is calling the New York Times, Fox "News", and several  sources within General Electric liars.

A highly-publicized front-page story in the New York Times on Saturday reported that Keith O had laid off the merciless teasing of his arch nemesis Bill O'Reilly at the instruction of the corporate suits at G.E.  NYT reporter Brian Stelter did stipulate that Olbermann told him by e-mail that he was "party to no deal," but Stelter reported nonetheless that pressure from higher ups had caused the host of Countdown to leave Bill-O alone.  The motivation was, according to Stelter, O'Reilly's retaliatory reporting on G.E.'s business dealings in Iran.

O'Reilly's reports were said to be so alarming to G.E. that the executive suits worked out a deal with the House of Murdoch wherein in Olbermann would stop teasing O'Reilly and Fox "News" would back off G.E.

Several critics, Glenn Greenwald notably, savaged the Fox/MSNBC truce as an unacceptable intrusion of corporate interests in the integrity of the newsroom.  And if there were such a truce, the critics would be, of course, absolutely correct.

But in his Worst Person in the World segment Monday night, Olbermann said that there is not, and never was, any deal to end the war between himself and O'Reilly.

And for emphasis, he devoted the entire segment to the truce story, targeting specifically Brian Stelter, Rupert Murdoch, and none other than Bill-O The Clown.

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Not only does Olbermann say he was never a party to such a deal, but that his bosses never asked him to be.

Says Greenwald:

"Really surprised by the Olbermann denial -- there's lots and lots of evidence that the NYT's description about what GE did is 100% accurate."

I suspect that the last word on this story has not been written.

Dick Morris: non-friendship with Ayers same as close friendship with bin Laden

This is what complete moral degradation and intellectual bankruptcy look like.

The right wing has abandoned any pretense of making a positive case for John McCain, and are content to spend the last month of the presidential campaign shrieking "terrorist" at Barack Obama.

Watch Dick Morris and Sean Hannity embarrass themselves by pretending that Barack Obama's lack of a relationship with Bill Ayers is “the equivalent of having a close relationship with Osama bin Laden.”



What a pathetic spectacle.

It is laughable to hear Hannity declare the urgency of "reminding" his audience about Bill Ayers as if they haven't been hearing about it non-stop for months and will not continue to hear about it every day between now and the election.

And as for Dick Morris... well, I'll just defer to Glenn Greenwald:

That Dick Morris is a buffoon is hardly news, but he was one of Bill Clinton's closest advisers and, for people who watch Fox News and read The New York Post, he's considered to be one of America's foremost political analysts. A potent reflection of our predominant political culture is the fact that people like Dick Morris can not only exist, but thrive within it[.]

The utter ridiculousness of telecom immunity

In three elegant paragraphs, Glenn Greenwald lays waste to the argument that congress should even consider - much less grant - retroactive immunity to telecom companies that cooperated with Bush's warrantless surveillance.

First, as Marty Lederman notes, the White House's willingness to disclose these documents in exchange for promises to vote for amnesty -- i.e., their use of these documents as political leverage -- demonstrates that there is no valid rationale, and never has been, for refusing to turn them over to Congress. Why would Congressional Democrats agree to give up something so extraordinary (telecom immunity) in exchange for the White House's "agreeing" to do what it is required in any event to do -- namely, comply with Congressional oversight demands for these documents?

Secondly, as any litigator will tell you, when you allow one party in possession of all documents voluntarily to show you the ones they want -- while concealing others -- the only picture you get is a distorted, biased and one-sided picture. The only mechanism for actually getting the truth is to compel the White House to turn over all documents, not to have Senators make a pilgrimage to the White House to look at the ones the White House has specially selected for them.

Finally, and most importantly, if it is really true that these magic documents show how innocent and reasonable were the telecoms' actions, then they will win in court. FISA and other statutes already provide immunity for them if they acted in good faith. There is no reason for Congress to put itself in the position of judge in this matter -- there already is a real judge in a real court presiding over these cases.

Neologism

On Thursday, Glenn Greenwald posted a commentary from University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos as part of a back-and-forth with rightwing blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds. It began when Reynolds, proprietor of the Instapundit blog, advocated the U.S. government-sponsored assasinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

In the course of their open exchange on this topic, Reynolds used a made up expression, "beclowned," to refer to Prof. Campos.

In response, Campos wrote the following which appeared on Greenwald's blog:

One could linger over such symptomatic features as the pompous neologism ("beclowned") deployed as a substitute for argument; the assumption that scholarly expertise can be acquired by a ten-minute Google search; the subsequent citation of "authorities" of whose existence the author was unaware ten minutes earlier; or the inevitable if rather surreal violation of Godwin's Law (we bombed the Nazis so what's wrong with assassinating Iranian civilians?).

Neologism

Main Entry: ne·ol·o·gism
Pronunciation: nE-'ä-l&-"ji-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: French néologisme, from ne- + log- + -isme -ism
1 : a new word, usage, or expression
2 : a meaningless word coined by a psychotic

Yeah, I'd say that just about sums it up.

Point, Campos!