Glenn Greenwald Smarter Than P.M. Carpenter

Unlike BuzzFlash's wannabe Machiavelli P.M. Carpenter, Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald clearly gets it.

Obama and the Betrayal of US Constitutional Democracy

Once again, BuzzFlash's P.M. Carpenter just doesn't get it.

Thankfully, others who have commented on Carpenter's latest apologist act for Barack Obama's spineless surrender to the fascists of the Bush administration do seem to get it, however. This comment, in particular, from "Clemsy Diggs" really hits the nail on the head:

Well PM, there's just one flaw in your argument that's like a bad taste I just can't get out of my mouth: The assumption that digging in against the FISA bill would have hurt his campaign.

I don't buy it. If this is his reasoning than he's a bit out of touch with what's going on in the street today. The only people not fed the hell up with Bush and his policies are hardcore brown shirts and congenital, reality-challenged idiots.

Congress is down to single digit approval ratings for the first time ever and a lot of that sentiment comes from frustration at a Democrat controlled Congress that keeps playing a shell game with the Bushies and losing every goddamn time.

After almost eight years of watching them walk out of the store, smiling, with all those little details that make America, well, America, people, yes even moderate people, are salivating over the image of someone standing up and saying, "No more!"

Yes, we get that politics in America is a dishonorable, septic tank affair.

But that's another assumption that needs to be put to the test... that this is the way it is and some things will never change.

Obama's initial appeal to many of us was that he was going to challenge this assumption. However, with the FISA bill he's climbed into the septic tank with the rest of them.

That he should know better is bad. That he may know better is worse.

One thing he probably does know is that he has us by the proverbial short hairs. MacCain will drag America into the long dark, and probably take a lot of the planet along with it.

What will Obama do? I really don't know. But I do know that it's way past time for the American people to take the power back from those who have convinced us we don't have any.

And I'm sick to death of politicians "keeping us safe." Their job is to keep the Constitution safe.

Americans need to remember we are willing to make our own sacrifices to preserve our own Revolution. We also need to remember who has the power.

We do.

Well said, Clemsy! If allegedly-smart campaigning now means shredding the principles of our Constitution then US democracy is in even greater peril than most of us already feared to be the case.

*UPDATE*

This bitterly tongue-in-cheek comment from Yman puts all of this in an even more terrifying light:

PM is absolutely RIGHT! Suck it up, people!!!!

What the hell do you people expect? It's about WINNING, damn it!!! And doing whatever it takes to WIN, no matter what the cost!!!

Yeah, yeah .... Fourth Amendment blah, blah, blah ........... who the hell cares! It's not like he's adopting conservative positions on the the Second Amendment and expanding the gun nuts' rights. Or lowering the wall between church and state. Or the Eighth Amendment and expanding the death penalty to crimes not involving killing. Or the Fifth Amendment (and a few others) and restricting a woman's right to choose to have an abortion.

C'mon! All you childish, pollyanna progressives who are criticizing Obama need to get over yourselves! Be PROUD of Obama's FISA support like PM!

Besides ........... there's still a whole bunch of Amendments left.

Indeed.

Legalized Watergate?

Here is a more direct and, hopefully, persuasive reason as to why Barack Obama and the Bush-appeasing Democrats need to think again about their cowardice over FISA.

Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of possessing this kind of legal carte blanche to tap the telecommunications of the Democratic National Committee, thus avoiding the need to dispatch G. Gordon Liddy and Co. to break into the Watergate Hotel. The sad and infuriating thing is that if Tricky Dickie had faced a Congress as weak-willed and spineless as the current one, he would certainly never have faced impeachment proceedings to hold him and key members of his administration accountable for their crimes against the republic.

Rant.

Was going to leave this as a comment on Steve's post, but it seems to have spiraled out of control. Anyway, while I can't speak for Steve, my personal problem with folks like Mr. Carpenter isn't so much that they love to flaunt their cynicism in the face of everyone else's idealism (though that is annoying), or that they're shamelessly re-writing history to suit their purposes (Kerry not pandering to the base? Puh-lease!). My point is that I think they dismiss the cynical case for opposition to telecoms immunity, or rather they ignore it completely.

And it's really not a difficult point to understand. McCain sat on a telecoms oversight committee, and has generally looked pretty friendly with the telcos for a while now, and Obama's been partly running (very successfully) on a platform of bashing the disproportionate influence of lobbyists in Washington. Now obviously he's also been running on the idea of being a post-partisan uniter, but if he did vote against it, and McCain did try to come after him on it, this is stuff he could legitimately bring up. "Well John, you make a good point about security, but my feeling was that the FISA bill was more of a sop to the telecoms industry than a security bill proper. A government handout. Kind of like those earmarks which you're saying will pay for the war when you cut them. Say, who's that back there holding your briefcase?"

OK, maybe something a little more polished than that, but you get the idea. Now at this point P.M.'s probably gesturing towards those hordes of unwashed "low information voters" who'll shit themselves when the Reps say that Obama's interested in letting t'rurists sue good American companies. I don't doubt that there's a goodly number of mouth-breathers who think that any backsliding on Bush's wonderful record on terrorism will immediately result in a mushroom cloud over Des Moines, but I think the usual term for them is the McCain base. Also, if you can keep discussion focussed on what it is the telcos are actually getting granted immunity for (not, to be fair, an easy task), then we're into a wonderful, wacky X-Files world that should flick the conspiracy theory switches on even the dumbest Bible-bashers: "Well, the President just pretty much went up to these companies and said, 'You have to put all the calls in America through the government,'" or something like that.

Now I'm not claiming that this would be easy, and I don't doubt that McCain would come out all guns blazing trying to claim that it was a wonderful bill and Obama's haggling over some petty detail that no-one cares about anyway and this is irresponsible in the extreme and shows that he's not nearly enough of a flyboy bad-ass to be leading the country and Ahmedinajad'll laugh at him in the playground and all the same tired Republican bullshit that they've been throwing for the last two years.

So it becomes a question of who can frame the debate best. Can Obama steer it towards lobbying, corruption and civil liberties, or can McCain manage to keep the focus on the nasty men with beards who would blow everyone up if Bush hadn't devised the terribly effective counter-measure of listening to the telephone conversations of everyone in the USA?

Might look like an uphill struggle for Obama, but he has more funds, he's ahead in the polls, he's showed he knows how to run a campaign, and everyone has spent the past six months spunking themselves about what a great orator he is, so I don't think we have to assume it's necessarily beyond his capacity. And the rewards are big. Take away the perception that McCain's a straight-shooting guy who knows how to run a war on terror, and what does he have left to run on? Somewhere between diddly and squat.

But say I'm wrong, and it'd be a ludicrous gamble with dubious pay-offs, and Obama has regretfully made the right move. Fine. If Carpenter was to explain why that's the case, and try to convince people, I'm sure they'd bite the bullet. Instead, he's just trying to cover for the fact that the Democrats can't seem to sell their ideas on Homeland Security as well as the Republicans by sounding like a tosser.

There He Goes Again

BuzzFlash's P.M. Carpenter still just doesn't get it while, ironically, lambasting us lefties for what he perceives as a similar intellectual failing. The FISA betrayal and shredding of the Constitution that it entails apparently just isn't that important unless you're some kind of political simpleton. Go figure.

Whatever happened to those heroes?

Larry Lessig says we should all just chill out about Obama's recent mis-steps. Being a bit of a cynic, I'd almost be prepared to agree with regards to finance, but on FISA, I really think he and many of his posters are misdiagnosing the problem.

Their basic argument seems to be that yes, telecom immunity is bad, but they have bigger fish to fry and this looks like a political loser.

But the key thing we need to keep in focus is what the objective here is. This is a hugely complex chess game. (Or I'm assuming it's complex, since how else can you explain losing twice (ok once) to this President.) The objective of this chess game is to keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win. Keeping focus (in this media environment, at least) is an insanely difficult task. But one tool in that game is picking the fights that resonate in ways that keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win.

So if I'm reading him right, he's saying Obama needs to keep focus on the economy, climate change, etc. and not cede points to the Republicans by getting into a debate about terrorism, which is their home turf.

Put more simply, his point is basically that you shouldn't go picking a fight with Republicans about matters of national security.

To which I really have to ask: Why the hell not?

Republicans have been showing themselves to be incompetent about matters of national security for the last seven years, why on earth do people think that the only way Democrats can win is by pussy-footing around the issue. Up until this point, Obama was doing a good job of turning this conventional wisdom on its head, making headway with such perceived acts of political hara-kiri as suggesting he'd negotiate with Iran.

This is partly because he dresses very nicely and gives a good speech, but also because he does have an awful lot of reality on his side. When he talks about how Iran seems to have halted nucleur development, or how sanctions to Cuba aren't necessarily acheiving the desired effects, he does at least have the advantage of having the weight of expert opinion on his side. That doesn't count for as much as it should in US politics, but it's not nothing.

Telecoms immunity seems to me to be one of those cases. Most experts will tell you that huge dragnet surveillance type systems (like plugging all US telecomunications through the NSA) are great for monitoring the population a large, but useless for targetting specific individuals who know they might be under surveilace and are doing their best to avoid it. You can catch the "sort-of-bad" with these systems, but the "really bad" will slip through the net. If you have a serious look at the issue, that's something that should become clear, so I'm not sure that shying away from that argument is the brilliant act of political strategy that Lessig thinks it is.

This is particularly upsetting because Lessig is the sort of enlightenment guy who spends half his life trying to explain stuff like this, and the other half being vexed about how politics tends to get these sorts of "easy questions" wrong. And his usual explanation for why they get it wrong is that there's not enough public scrutiny. This is why he gets involved in lots of technology-based projects to make congress more transparent.

So from that point of view, this shouldn't look to him like an issue to shy away from for Obama. It should, in fact, look like a golden opportunity: take the right side on FISA and dare the Republicans to come after you on it. If they want to have a debate about their unconstitutional and ineffective surveillance practices in the glaring light of an election campaign, then good fucking luck to them.

Let the buyer's remorse begin.

Obviously we all knew that Obama would be a little disappointing eventually, but this seems like too much too soon. Not like he can fall back on Bush's "Well, I was going to read the constitution but it's got a lot of big words in it" excuse, either:

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people

Additional steps!? Has someone been reading the Gordon Brown terrorism-hard-man-posturing playbook?

Update: Tim Lee explains why this sort of thing is ultimately a losing game for Democrats:

We are, in other words, right back to the narrative where being “strong” on national security means trashing the constitution. Within that frame, Democrats are always going to lose because they’re never going to be as enthusiastic about Constitution-trashing as the Republicans (well, I hope so anyway. Bill Clinton did his best). So by conceding the premise and saying, in effect, “we can trash the constitution too!” the Democrats were setting themselves up for future political problems. Because if the Democrats are carbon copies of the Republicans on national security issues, why not go for the real thing?

This is doubly disappointing because until now Obama has been a master at re-framing national security debates to get out of this box. Unlike John Kerry, he has refused to shy away from a confrontational posture on foreign policy issues. He’s shown a willingness to say he has a better foreign policy vision, rather than simply insisting he can be just as tough on the terrorists as the Republicans are. He could and should have done the same with FISA, taking the opportunity to explain why warrantless surveillance isn’t necessary to protect us from the terrorists. But it seems he, along with Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid, chickened out. So it’s back to Republicans being tough on national security and Democrats defensively insisting that they, too, hate terrorists more than they love the constitution.