General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This is what hurts my brain a little bit. [View all]timdog44
(1,388 posts)I don't give a fig if he is a Rand Paul supporter. Never said that. So I am not painting with a wide brush. And I understand that historically the US did a lot, and still does a lot, of not so nice things. I am again not painting Snowden with this brush, nor did I ever, although I saw the attempts to do that. Wrong way to do things. My question is - what is Snowden's motive? As I said, do you think he had an epiphany and is coming out as some kind of saint? I think he did not have an epiphany and I think he is copycat mode. I think he got snowed by that traitor, Greenwald. And as you can tell, I don't think highly of Greenwald. I don't think he did an investigative lift of the finger in this story other than to take some low level spy wannabe and convince him to tell some sensational stuff.
I agree the government is huge and runs on its own inertia. Obama does not have much of the control that people attribute to him. If he said for some agency to do a certain thing, it would get done in its own time, and not Obama time. I think the comparison to Hitler is a little over the line and I don't think that is what is happening. I think there is not a lot of real information on this yet and with time we will find that what has been done, has been done legally and not as intrusively as everyone is crying about.
Surveillance is the necessary evil of our day. We need to pare down the agencies that can do this to a few, eliminate the mercenary spies (and I mean that in the most terrible way possible as I hate mercenaries). I think mercenaries are non allegiant beings who out only for the money. They have dropped out of the government to make consulting fees. Hateful. And then the surveillance needs to be put in some encrypted form that the government knows, so that corporation or other governments can't use against us.
In all this, I again say, I trust Obama and when Al Franken came out and said his piece I was more of a believer. I am not naive enough to believe this can not be used against us, but I also trust the ACLU to do the thing that they do - protect our constitutional rights by suing and testing their limits.
I truly understand what you are getting to, I think I am just in a different tack. I hope we are both right. If that is possible. I do listen to what you say. I have followed a lot of your posts. You make sense, and make me work hard at what I think. Thanks for that.