Sadly, it looks like the terrorists have won.

[JDPriestly]

Once upon a time, before 9/11, we were a pretty free country.

Then came 9/11.

Since then terrorists have killed very few of us and destroyed virtually no buildings. But our reaction to them has destroyed our freedom and buried our Constitution.

I guess they succeeded after all.

If we want to defeat them, then we have to change our direction and save not just our lives and our buildings but our freedom our Constitution.

[villager]

1. Even here at the "Underground," you find cheerleaders for the circumventing of the Constitution

Sad, and perhaps sadder because it's no longer shocker.

[JDPriestly]

2. Very true. It's just so cozy to feel yourself part of an elite, and

that is what this program is about.

A very elite, unelected group that answers to private companies, not directly to our government, gets to see and analyze the data that is collected and decide who does or does not get droned or whatever they do to people they identify as bad guys. No public trial. Nothing. No right to confront your accusers.

Do we believe that the rights guaranteed us in the Constitution are universal or not? That is the question.

[RobertEarl]

3. Go shopping!

"There are people out there who will never quit trying to destroy America, and neither will we"... paraphrasing our last great glorious leader!

At least when he said it, we got upset. I almost miss him. He was a great uniter!

[kenny blankenship]

12. "I almost miss him" - apparently you aren't alone

It's almost like he's still with us, and instead of him leaving, only our anger at him went away. Here is what Barack hath wrought :
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/304825-gallup-bushs-approval-rating-goes-positive-for-the-first-time-since-2005
Gallup poll: Bush’s approval rating positive for first time since 2005

A plurality of voters have a favorable view of former President George W. Bush, according to the latest Gallup poll, marking the first time in eight years he has held a net positive approval rating.

Forty-nine percent said they view Bush favorably with 46 percent saying they view him unfavorably.

The last time Bush had a positive approval rating was in 2005, when he registered a 54 percent positive and 45 negative split. Bush’s approval rating has slowly improved since bottoming out in early 2008 at 66 percent negative and 32 positive.

Bush has avoided the spotlight since leaving office, but emerged earlier this year to open his presidential library in Dallas. When Bush left office, 40 percent said they had a favorable view of him, against 59 unfavorable.
-=-=-=-=-=-

He ought to be out of sight out of mind entirely, camping in the cell Slobodan Milosevic used to call home.

[RobertEarl]

14. I don't miss him

I guess the gullible sheeple, when they see that Obama has not jailed Bush, figure "maybe he wasn't so bad?"

I could never be an elected politician because I'd be telling the gullible sheeple to STFU. Can't even do it on DU.

[John2]

24. I don't take

the same view as others do in Polls. Polls are useful if you do them for scientific purposes only, but they can also be used to manipulate public opinion and pOlicy by the people doing these Polls. Once again, people are taking Gallup's word as the Gospel or even the Washington Post or Wall Street. Even Pew has altered and manipulated Polls.

I wonder whom Gallup employees Polled and what questions they asked. I personally don't consider Polling about the popularity of Bush important unless there is some agenda behind it, such as rehabilitating his image. You have a Pool of 300 million people out there, and any Pollster can find enough respondants to get whatever result they desire. And most of these Polls are done by the corporate media or organizations controled by corporate interests. If you ever worked for any corporation, like I have, mangement has influence on your work product. Most employees try to please management too.

[ucrdem]

4. Can I offer an alternative view?

The terrorists won when Bush-Cheney muscled their way into the WH in 2000. By some miracle they didn't completely destroy our political system and went away when their 2nd term was up. Maybe they were just tired; Cheney left in a wheelchair as I recall.

Along came Mr Hope and Change, who'd already betrayed the far left by voting for the FISA bill he'd promised to veto. Then he appointed Clinton folks to his cabinet, including Hillary. More outrage. Herbert Hoover! One-term wonder. Manchurian candidate, stealth Republican, Ronnie lover, etc etc. Abject disillusionment. We're f#cked!

But then a strange thing happened. The bailouts worked, the crash stalled, Detroit didn't go bankrupt, and the Iraq war came to its scheduled end. Etc. So it turned out those Clinton retreads and Wall Street-friendly appointees didn't mean jack. Why did he appoint them? Possibly for window dressing, camouflage, plausible deniability, you get the idea.

But he's governed as a straight-up Dem and all this NSA hand-wringing, praise Betty, is five years overdue. It isn't harmless however because if it keeps up we're going to see another Bush presidency or worse in 2016. So yes, elections do mean something and yes, you need to tough out the RW bullshit instead of falling for it.

[JDPriestly]

8. Have you noticed the number of Republican Bush holdovers

that Obama has named to his administration, the number of very right-wing conservatives.

I read that John Edwards' affair was discovered because of his Verizon phone records. That makes me wonder who got the records and how.

I mostly only call my family, but I do post on DU and get a lot of e-mails from liberals. But I just don't want my records stored in some database like this and maybe pulled out for some odd reason.

This program is far more dangerous than people realize. I can't believe that people do not understand that.

The national security apparatus was well entrenched before Obama came into office. He is acquiescing to it. He has no choice. He would disappear in very quickly if he didn't just submit to the horror.

I don't like the scrutiny this program imposes on the lives of ordinary Americans. Can you imagine the horrible scrutiny under which this same national security apparatus and all of the threats against us out there place Obama and his family.

So, I don't think that the outrage against this program has much to do with Obama. I am not outraged at Obama. He handles these situations very well and will also handle this one with grace and wisdom. I am very pleased that we now know about this program. I don't think this is a partisan issue. The program was created under a series of administration.

The organizational framework in which the program exists has been created through a process that began shortly after WWII, maybe even during WWII.

We do need security. We do not need this kind of massive, all-encompassing database. It is sick.

[ucrdem]

9. Okay you're not outraged at Obama. But the current outrage is directed at him.

So when you buy into it you're helping further weaken him. Now here's the important point: if all this metadata is stored, and I've seen no credible evidence whatsoever that they're storing the contents of every message, who do you think you're more in danger from, a Dem administration or another Bush reign of terra? Because that's what this and every other RW scandal is engineered to accomplish.

[George Gently]

23. Hear. Hear.

[Laelth]

29. I find it hard to believe that this is a right-wing scandal.

If so, it's very poorly timed (17 months before the 2014 mid-terms, after Obama's 2nd term "honeymoon" period, after Obama's 2012 election). You get the point.

It appears to me the Snowden and Greenwald chose the timing of this release to do the least possible damage to President Obama and the Democratic Party.



-Laelth

[ucrdem]

30. Aye, every inch a RW scandal, and timed with lethal accuracy

as they often are. Do you remember that US-China summit in Palm Springs last weekend? The one EarlG made this front-page cartoon about?



Well, EarlG was exactly right. The Chinese got the better end of the bargain thanks to Glenn and the CATO crew. Here are a couple of stories showing that Obama was, in fact, handicapped during the US-China summit:

NSA Scandal Looms Over Obama-Xi Talks
by Ari Shapiro | NPR | June 08, 2013 5:25 AM

President Obama always intended to talk about spying this weekend. But not like this.

He's at a sprawling estate in the Southern California desert this weekend, getting to know China's new leader, but domestic controversies have followed him there.

The president veered off his talking points Friday to spend more than ten minutes defending a pair of massive surveillance operations that the media recently disclosed.

(snip)

Some members of Obama's own party are now attacking him for overreaching, and civil liberties groups are comparing him unfavorably to President George W. Bush. So Obama was feeling the heat before he took off for to Palm Springs.


(snip)

Xi and his entourage are not sleeping in the guest rooms, though. The Chinese delegation decided to stay at a hotel nearby out of fear that the U.S. might be spying on them. . .

http://www.npr.org/2013/06/08/189724905/nsa-scandal-looms-over-obama-xi-talks

US-China summit ends with accord on all but cyber-espionage
The Guardian, Sunday 9 June 2013 04.48 EDT

Obama's meeting with Xi overshadowed by revelations of NSA's snooping – but deals are made on N Korea and HFCs emissions

The Chinese contrition over cyber-attacks that Washington had hoped for failed to materialise, but historic talks between presidents Obama and Xi Jinping lived up to their billing in other regards with agreement on issues ranging from climate change to North Korea.

Meeting in the baking heat of a Palm Springs country estate, the two leaders broke with protocol for two days of informal talks aimed at creating a new spirit of co-operation between the world's two economic superpowers.

The common ground they found, however, was not quite what the White House expected as talks on cyber-espionage were overshadowed by revelations of Washington's own cyberwarfare strategy.

Both leaders discussed the issue for several hours, according to aides, but the best that the US was able to boast afterwards was that Beijing was no longer unaware of the depth of feeling on the subject.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/us-china-summit-barack-obama-xi-jinping

Brought to you by the freedumb-lovin' patriots at the CATO Institute:

[Laelth]

31. I'd like to see some evidence that this particular scandal has right-wing origins.

Has the right-wing launched scandals in the past? Sure. So has the left wing. Is the right enjoying this scandal now and attempting to capitalize on it? Sure, they'd be stupid not to. But I see no hard evidence that Snowden's release of info. is some kind of right-wing ploy (other than the fact that Snowden donated money to Rand Paul, and that's weak evidence at best).

My suggestion to the President and to the Democratic Party is to find a way to turn this to our advantage. As you can imagine, I think we'd be well-served if the President were to come out against the program.

But, we shall see what we see. Blind trust, however, is not my strong suit.

-Laelth

[ucrdem]

32. How much evidence do you need?

I suppose you know that Greenwald also has a CATO connection?



Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo on Jan 31, 2012:

If it looks like a duck etc. and we're seeing a lot of this duck lately.

[Laelth]

33. I did know he was paid once (I think) to speak to them.

Seriously, though, about the China thing, it appears that we have been hacking Chinese government systems for over 10 years. The problem, now, is that Chinese hackers have caught up with us in terms of their hacking capabilities (probably). Now, when we go complaining to China about their hacking of our sensitive data, their rightful reaction is to laugh at us because we've been doing the same thing to them for a lot longer.

If Snowden's leak is a right-wing ploy, what I'd like to know is how it benefits the right. That's the real evidence I am looking for. Their constituents are as divided on this subject as we are on the left. If you have a theory about what the right-wing hopes to gain out of this, I'd love to hear it.



-Laelth

[ucrdem]

35. Okay here's how it benefits the right, in fine:

This type of manufactured "scandal" is pure GOP ratfuck, the transparent purposes of which are to (a) handicap Obama in every way possible, in this case by undermining his position in last weekend's US-China summit, and (b) discourage swing voters from supporting Democrats in 2014. And that's worth pointing out and making a stink about, IMHO.

Pardon the recycling from an earlier post. As for (b), if you want to see swing voters peeling away like pencil shavings, take a look at this poll:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2999446

73 votes, only 29 supporting the current Dem admin, and that's right here on DU.

[Laelth]

36. Thanks for the reply.

But why in the world would the right want to handicap the President in the US-China summit? That makes no sense. He's working for them, not for the left. The right wants the new "free trade" agreement that the President is negotiating, don't they? They are afraid of Chinese hackers (one of the things Obama wanted to address). If anything, it's the left that might want to sabotage those negotiations.

I agree with you that the President is being attacked on this. That's why I think he needs to get out in front of it and stand up for the Constitution. Admittedly, that will take a lot of courage, but, strategically, if he wants to protect the Democratic Party, he'd better do it and do it soon. If he continues to defend the program, we may very well suffer severe damage at the polls in 2014 and beyond.

Of course, his hands may be tied. If so, there's nothing he can do but ride the wave. I do not envy him.

-Laelth

[ucrdem]

37. The logic of RW politics is its own thing.

It's far more important to the right that Obama be seen to fail publicly than that he succeed in anything, no matter who it benefits. That's why you didn't hear about the bailouts that worked, or the TARP funds that got repaid, or the economic indicators that are surging, or the upticks in home construction, manufacturing, savings or anything else. The RW -- and that includes essentially all national media, left right or alternative -- first and foremost want to destroy Obama, and they want to convince you he's working against your interests. He isn't. He's working for interests of everyone. That's what he promised to do, and that's what he's been doing, and succeeding at. But you wouldn't know it.

[JDPriestly]

45. What difference does it make?

This program chills our exercise of our constitutional rights. Its main supporters are people like Peter King and other right-wingers. That proves to me that Snowden is not some right-wing puppet.

Snowden is just telling us what is going on.

On the one hand, Obama apologists on DU insist that Snowden did not reveal anything new. On the other they say this is a right-wing plot against Obama. It's one or the other. Either this has been known for a long time or it is being brought out to embarrass Obama.

I think the Obama apologists are just in the stage of denial in the fives stages of grief. Obama is going to have to make some basic changes if he is to survive this and leave a healthy legacy for the Democratic Party.

Anyway, I'm for common sense and feet on the ground in 2016. I am for Elizabeth Warren for president. She has better judgment and understanding than any other politician in America. We need her. She would find the right balance.

[LittleBlue]

5. They got us to give away something they couldn't take from us.

Our freedom.

They won.

[ucrdem]

6. Who did?

[LittleBlue]

10. The terrorists

I doubt it was even their original intent. They wanted to draw us into unwinnable quagmires in the Mid East.

But their biggest victory weren't those, it was the siege mentality that seems to never go away. We aren't yet a police state, we're a security state.

9/11 didn't change the world, their victory was making us believe that it did.

[ucrdem]

13. Ah yes those terrorists.

Possibly, but the ones who did the real damage were the terrorists who captured the WH in 2000.

[LittleBlue]

15. Indeed

They capitalized on the opportunity created by it

[kenny blankenship]

7. Terrorists - Fascists. They NEED each other.

[Xithras]

38. All authoritarians need a boogeyman.

It doesn't matter which "side" they're fighting on. All they need for authoritarianism to work is for you to fear "the other guy" more than you fear "our guy".

It's been demonstrated throughout history, is on display in an extreme form in nations like Syria right now, and has pervasively infiltrated the United States over the past few decades. We can put up with "our guy" abusing us, so long as he protects us from the even more dangerous "other guy".

[woo me with science]

11. I would say the corporatists have won

using the tactics of terrorism.

K&R

[cantbeserious]

21. Bingo - We Have A Winner

eom

[magellan]

34. +1

And corporatism is a bipartisan game.

[Skittles]

16. the "terrorists" are white, male, middle-aged and they wear suits

they are the folk who are destroying the "American way of life"

[Gravitycollapse]

17. We let them destroy our way of life and we let them sell us a bill of goods.

[ucrdem]

18. Was the damage permanent?

I'd say no. Compare international flights then and now. World of difference. Domestic flights too. Border crossings even. Like it or not the Obama administration has reversed a lot of the damage already.

p.s. the last Rapiscon "backscatter" scanner was yanked out of the last US airport this month, at the expense of the manufacturer. One less outrage.

[Gravitycollapse]

19. Great, I was just subject to a virtual strip search by a millimeter wave scanner today.

[ucrdem]

20. Where?

And what exactly is a virtual strip search?

[liberal N proud]

26. Airport full body scanner

[GoCubsGo]

27. Those are Rapiscanners.

As was mentioned above, they are no longer in use.

[Gravitycollapse]

42. That's strange considering I was searched with one 3 times in the last week.

Millimeter wave scanners have not been removed. And they are virtual strip searches.

[Gravitycollapse]

43. Phoenix Sky Harbor, La Guardia and Charlotte Douglas.

This is what an Active Millimeter Scanner looks like...

[GoCubsGo]

28. Yep.

And, they're the main reason we have the brown-skinned, plane-crashing, building-smashing ones, to boot. They created a lot of them.

[Skittles]

44. CORRECT

[panzerfaust]

22. Yep. They won in the almost bloodless coup of the 2000 presidental race

where we ended up with a preselected president installed by extra-constitutional means and have ever since been being moved to a surveillance police state which fuses the power of the government with that of corporate capitalism - that system of government which Mussolini brought to the world as fascism.

The "Brooks Brothers Riot" of the 2000 Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade is a perfect example. The polling headquarters was flooded with "plants" demanding the vote count be stopped. Republicans always want to stop the vote count; it's a part of their strategy. When there is a large turnout, or when all the votes are counted, that usually bodes well for Democrats. At least ten of the Brooks Brothers Fake Rioters were staffers from Washington DC.

From ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shannyn-moore/artificial-protestors-are_b_254276.html

[jessie04]

25. We have to pick up your spirits.

We are just finding the right balance between liberty and safety.

Al-queda is a figment of what it was.



They lost.

[datasuspect]

39. the thing is

none of this is about terrorism.

[forestpath]

40. If terrorism didn't exist the government would have invented it.

It's the easiest way to keep the sheeple in line.

[Melinda]

41. I said as much in my sunken thread of last night...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022995332

I grew up in the 1960's, yeah, age of duck and cover and the KGB, the Iron Curtain and Stassi, the Eastern Bloc, Mao and Chinese oppression and the rise of right wing dictatorships within this hemisphere resulting in the "disappearing" of tens of thousands of people in Central and South America. How proud we were knowing we were Americans and free. Freedom from our government spying and collecting data on us as other governments did, free to speak out in protest, simply free to speak out, to work to change laws we found untenable.

Now we must be careful not to use certain words or phrases that may cause our detention.... shades of totalitarian regimes.

It seems to me that terrorism has won. Bin Laden succeeded. I'd love to be proven wrong.

--------------------

Thankfully, with your OP, it's apparent I'm not alone in feeling this way. Thanks for posting, JD.