Thursday, December 15, 2011

BECAUSE THEY CAN

I haven't quite known how to react to this:

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantanamo Bay....

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the "war on terror" to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention....


Now, see, I expect Republicans to want to run the country in a way that's different from the way I'd want to run it, or the way moderates want to run it. But I just don't believe that Republicans actually give a crap whether the president has these powers. I don't think they give a crap whether a future Republicans president has these powers.

I'm convinced that Republicans didn't push this for either of those reasons. They did so for one reason: to grind Democrats' faces in it. It's a wedge issue, Republicans know they're taking the popular position -- and so they do this simply because it lets them make Democrats eat dirt.

One of our major political parties uses the political equivalent of mob violence as a routine, everyday tool. And the majority of the political culture is still in denial about that fact.

1 comment:

c u n d gulag said...

Ugh, this one's hard to stomach!

I guess Obama and the Democrats don't want this as a wedge issue in 2012 - you know the Conservative crowd, which needs to wear Depends all of the time because they soil themselves on a regular basis in fear, thinks that every A-Rab in America is out to get them, and that the Justice System either can't handle them properly, jail them far enough away, or is insufficiently punitive and cruel.

And he's been pretty good at eliminating wedge issues. Obama got Congressional cover on eliminating DADT. And, he's not pushing to end DOMA because he knows he doesn't have the votes right now, and didn't then, so he's having Justice not enforce the stupid law.
But the right will use the same wedge issues anyway, and make some up new shit along the way too.

I think he's hoping that in 2013 he can start to sign good legislation that's passed by a Democratic House and Senate.

But this may help to suppress the vote of the people who'd voted for him and Democrats enthusiastically in 2008, and cause even worse shit coming from the next Republican Congress.

And THEN he can veto it. And that's IF he wins.

Either way - Ugh!