I'm surprised that Joe Lieberman and Obama haven't been more of a focus of the condemnation here and at other websites.
Obama has been using Joe Lieberman to hide behind, to do his dirty work, for some time now. Whether it's:
1) taking single payer universal health care, a public option, investigations and prosecutions of Bush-Cheney, etc., off the table, OR
2) continuing the Bush-Cheney policies and going Bush-Cheney one better by asserting that presidents have the right to k!II American citizens with no due process, no oversight, and 'preventive detention' (the right of a president to imprison anyone indefinitely because he thinks they might commit a crime, or using Joe Lieberman to hide behind and duck out on his campaign pledge of transparency while he gutted the FOIA, how does any real Democrat defend Obama?
What Obama did with Lieberman, how he did it (sneakily, deceptively, and also not the first time) should have all Democratic voters, if not all Americans, demanding their heads.
Few know about this:
After the court ordered Obama's DoD release the torture and abuse photos of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama pledged during the 2008 campaign to release and then flip-flopped on after he got into the White House, Obama had Lieberman slip into legislation the empowerment of the Secretary of Defense to gut FOIA and bury the evidence forever.
And after Obama signed that legislation into law, away from the fanfare of cameras, he waited until he was out of the country two weeks later for Gates to exercise the power of that legislation which buried those photos forever. Obama has been going to great lengths to distance himself from his actions and his orders, insulating himself from ramifications of his decisions.
Obama's trip to Afghanistan now while the fight is on to let the Bush tax cuts expire, not using the power of the presidency, of the bully pulpit, to fight for the poor and middle classes, is exactly what Obama did during the healthcare debate. That was when he made his last secret trip to Afghanistan.
If you want to see patterns, go into newspaper archives and see what happened here at home every time Obama left the country. Look with an eye on what happened in Congress, what Democrats did or didn't do, and how Obama used these trips to take advantage of a national 'rule of thumb', about not criticizing a president when he's on foreign soil.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Read more...
