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"Obama has done more than any modern executive to wage war on whistleblowers."...
9/26/12, "Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama," The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf
"On stage, as he smiles into the camera, using words to evoke some of the
best sentiments within us, it's hard to believe certain facts about
him:
1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost
daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn't
"precise" or "surgical" as he would have Americans believe. It kills
hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more
innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes
their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid.
Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress
they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by
an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly
strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more
terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives
of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a
small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and
illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And
Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible
policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as
any conservative ideologue.
2. Obama established one of the most
reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order
and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama's kill
list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything
George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive
power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats
rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is
hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio
host has done.
3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding
of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand,
President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without
Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent
threat to national security.
In different ways, each of these
transgressions run contrary to candidate Obama's 2008 campaign. (To cite
just one more example among many, Obama has done more than any modern executive to wage war on whistleblowers.
In fact, under Obama, Bush-era lawbreakers, including literal torturers, have been subject to fewer and less draconian attempts at punishment them than some of the
people who conscientiously came forward to report on their
misdeeds.) Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking
office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the
nature of the country.
But instead of ending those excesses, protecting
civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core
American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of
his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they
put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical
post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life....
If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly
terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties,
goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other
misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in."...via Instapundit
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