President Obama continues to put on his best “reassuring” face every day when he addresses the NSA surveillance scandal, insisting that he is entirely comfortable with the surveillance and wants to make sure everyone else is comfortable with it.
And clearly we’re not, and President Obama knows we’re not because the NSA is reading all those emails Americans have been trading about how uncomfortable we are at being surveilled.
President Obama brags about the situation as proof of his “transparency,” but the reality is that he got caught, well into his second term in office, in a decidedly secret scheme, and has been fighting vigorously to punish the whistleblower who uncovered it.
That and Obama’s claims that he “welcomes debate” don’t make a lot of sense, since the whole reason the debate is even happening is because of the leaks, and the debate consists of people pointing out the horrible things the leaked documents say are going on and being met by blanket denials and calls for calm.
The debate Obama desperately wants to convince us he wants could be facilitated in no small measure if he would tell us literally anything specific about the program, because at the end of the day, he’s simply appealing to Americans to trust him when the leaks show he is decidedly untrustworthy.
That's wonderful.., now we have to have a debate about illegal matter for the senate to make the illegal a legal matter. That is to say if senators are willing to expose what NSA knows about their privet life before any debate to start.
That is an incredibly punchable face.
BS Obama has again proven himself to be the most dangerous, sinister and cynical tool of corporate-state interests in recent history, 'sine non qua'! His policy has been to glibly obfuscate and redefine the public interest as that which he and his ruling class cohort have determined it to be. As the continuing exercise in unlimited global electronic surveillance has developed exponentially, with ever expanding information-gathering to detect hypothetically imagined, real, or potential 'subversion', as problematic as that may be, by virtue of it's very existence and unlimited scope it has developed autonomously into a vast unaccountable tool and organ of government thought control and intimidation, generating a mechanism of internalized restraint in order to achieve an acquiescent citizenry willing to accept and thereby cement a total complicity in the illegal application of force and power upon those who have been declared enemies, domestic and foreign, of the State.. 'L’etat, c’est moi' is historically the realm of absolute monarchs and tyrants. We might inquire of his last few remaining supporters where this leaves Mr. Obama along with Congress and the rest of Imperial Washington.
John F.Kennedy
"Think not what your government can do for you,
but what you can do for your government."
And that is exactly what Snowden did, he gave government a hard swift kick in the guts, a big-bang bunch of light that forced a whole lot of darkness to give way.
Actually I think he said "country".
Because, why do you want to do something for a bunch entiltled administrative class that you get taxed to pay for anyway at paylevels you don't get to decide?
'Clearly we are not comfortable with the NSA surveillance policies'? …
Well, I am not comfortable with it, and I am sure many of those reading this website are not either, but as for the majority of Americans I am not sure if they even realize what is going on.
I would love to be wrong, but we would need some evidence (polls, studies in press opinions, etc) to confirm this. Until then, only the NSA will really know how popular they are, and judging by their actions, I would say they feel very popular right now.