Obama’s Democratic Authoritarianism
He's bad – really bad – on civil liberties
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 He's
not closing Guantanamo,
he's continuing the "preventive detention" policy of the
Bush administration under
a new rubric ("prolonged detention"), he's on
board with military commissions ("reformed," of course)
and the denial
of habeas corpus – and last, but certainly not least, his supporters
in Congress have launched a campaign to give him and his cabinet
officials the power to close
down the Internet in the name of "national security."
I won't go
on at length about the brazen hypocrisy and general slipperiness
exhibited by Obama and his fans when it comes to key civil liberties
issues such as these. Jack Goldsmith, former head of George W. Bush's
Office of Legal Counsel, and Rachel Maddow, progressive commentator
on MSNBC, have done a superlative job of that. Goldsmith, of course,
notes the president's turn on a dime with obvious
approval, arguing that the Bush approach was haphazard and lacked
any substantive legal basis, while Maddow is horrified that, instead
of abolishing these Bush-era assaults on the Constitution, her former
hero is intent on formalizing and "legalizing" them. Go
here to see her deliver the kind of stinging rebuke to Obama
and his administration that Rush Limbaugh and his fellow radio ranters
could never hope to match.
 Maddow
strikes a powerful blow against Cheneyism-without-Cheney by pointing
out that the president's preventive detention policy – which claims
for the U.S. government the right to hold anyone, including American
citizens, indefinitely, without trial, without formal charges,
and without telling anyone – is worse than anything Bush ever attempted
in one important sense. The Bushian effort was secretive
and strictly ad
hoc; the Obamaites, however, are quite openly constructing what
Obama calls "a new legal
regime" to preside over this wholesale assault on the
Constitution.
At least the
Bush crowd had enough remnants of a moral sense to sneak around
and try [.pdf]
to hide their crimes
against liberty
and the
rule of law. Although they tried to rationalize their actions
with after-the-fact
legal arguments, the effort seems to me rather halfhearted:
they weren't really all that concerned with legalizing their power
grab. They just went
ahead and did it, and damn the torpedoes.
The Obamaites,
on the other hand, have a different style – but the substance is
essentially the same, with the addition of a few minor tweaks and
rhetorical flourishes. They want to bureaucratize and institutionalize
the horrors of the past eight years and make what used to be unthinkable
routine.
Read
the rest of the article
May
27, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
Justin
Raimondo Archives
|
