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The New (and On Notice) Obama Thread
silence1186
Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered User regular
Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered User regular
Opening note: thread is mod-approved, but if it strays off topic, it will be killed, messily. Can't make any guarantees for the people involved, either.
So, Barack Obama is the President of the United States of America. And very few people seem to like him anymore.
"But wait!" I said to myself. I don't think he's doing such a bad job. Could I just be a mindless partisan, and blind to his poor performance?
A quick Google search reveals two similar websites you may have heard of:
This Pro-Obama site
and
This Anti-Obama site
The strange thing is that these two websites list either the same thing, with one listing it as a positive and the other as a negative, or, more strikingly, listing two things which are the exact opposite of each other.
"Hold on a second. If I know one thing about reality, it's that two mutually exclusive things can't exist simultaneously."
At this point it would appear someone is playing fast and loose with the truth. Although it's pretty obvious why people would lie about the President to raise/reduce people's positive esteem of him, I have to wonder what percent of people disapprove of him because of:
1) The things he's done
2) The things that have happened under his watch which he was not involved with or had no control over
3) The political intransigence sabotaging his ability to affect positive change in the world
4) The outright fabrications spread about him to turn public opinion against him, backed up by (3).
This thread is to discuss President Obama, his falling approval rating, and whether people's public opinion of him is because of his failings, the outright fabrication spread about him by his political opponents, a combination thereof, or any other angle I've failed to mention.
Fair warning: this thread is being watched, so if you're not talking about the above, please take it to a more appropriate thread, or make a topic to discuss it. Better the thread simmer for a few days if there's no news worth discussing than it getting run over by a tangent train.
Enjoy!
So, Barack Obama is the President of the United States of America. And very few people seem to like him anymore.
According to the [recent NBC News/WSJ] poll, 41 percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s overall job performance, while 54 percent disapprove – his worst job approval rating in the survey’s history.
"But wait!" I said to myself. I don't think he's doing such a bad job. Could I just be a mindless partisan, and blind to his poor performance?
A quick Google search reveals two similar websites you may have heard of:
This Pro-Obama site
and
This Anti-Obama site
The strange thing is that these two websites list either the same thing, with one listing it as a positive and the other as a negative, or, more strikingly, listing two things which are the exact opposite of each other.
"Hold on a second. If I know one thing about reality, it's that two mutually exclusive things can't exist simultaneously."
At this point it would appear someone is playing fast and loose with the truth. Although it's pretty obvious why people would lie about the President to raise/reduce people's positive esteem of him, I have to wonder what percent of people disapprove of him because of:
1) The things he's done
2) The things that have happened under his watch which he was not involved with or had no control over
3) The political intransigence sabotaging his ability to affect positive change in the world
4) The outright fabrications spread about him to turn public opinion against him, backed up by (3).
This thread is to discuss President Obama, his falling approval rating, and whether people's public opinion of him is because of his failings, the outright fabrication spread about him by his political opponents, a combination thereof, or any other angle I've failed to mention.
Fair warning: this thread is being watched, so if you're not talking about the above, please take it to a more appropriate thread, or make a topic to discuss it. Better the thread simmer for a few days if there's no news worth discussing than it getting run over by a tangent train.
Enjoy!
0
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
They had to work hard to get re-elected but really have nothing to hold them back from doing unpopular things after that final election. I'd be curious to see a chart or graph depicting the approval ratings of second term presidents.
If my hunch is correct, they are going to be overwhelmingly similar in their decline. And the numbers quoted in the OP for Obama don't strike me as that low considering the numbers seen for our other elected representatives.
If a republican looks at those numbers and thinks they're all supporters for their side, they're foolish.
Something like the NSA thing I could possibly see as a valid complaint. But then there's stuff like Benghazi, which is still constantly pushed by certain outlets and does convince some people he's doing a bad job.
Wait, you can't hold a lawyer responsible if he represents someone people don't like. Like, if he, as a lawyer, failed to do the best job possible for his client, even if his client is guilty as hell, wouldn't he be facing charges from the bar? This sort of blows my mind.
Yes because the message wecwamt to send is "don't defend unsavory clients or your career is dead"
Except the situation is a lot messier than the left portrayed it. This specific case is one where progressives haven't ever really owned up to the mess they made, and it's that mess that ultimately derailed the nomination. I'd like progressives to acknowledge that in some cases, yes, their shit does stink.
You don't think that happens already? Goodman, Cutler, Dershowitz, Greenwald, Cochran - all lawyers who saw themselves and their careers defined by their clients.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to this than just an "unsavory client". The Mumia case is a messy one, and it's in large part due to how the left treated him.
As near as I can tell law enforcement dislike that a lawyer took on a case of somebody who killed a cop. Which is utter and complete bullshit. They know better than anyone that a guy without a lawyer is fucked in the system, and it's not like the guy walked or anything.
When I looked into more detail on this Adegbile joined the NAACP legal team in general, not for this specific case. He put forth a legal argument that was upheld by a federal judge as a valid issue. At no point am I aware of where he did anything but act as a lawyer should.
Be pissed at the dude who shot the cop. If you must blame somebody in our system, blame the federal judge (but note he's been upheld on this ruling.) The lawyer who pointed out we were doing something unjust is the last person to blame.
Being pissed at him is just blue wall of silence goosery.
That's a very barebones description of the the festering shitpile that is the Mumia case - for a good time, he was a cause celebre on the left (I can remember seeing Free Mumia signs when I was in college), where it was pushed that he was a political prisoner. There's also the fact that the Fraternal Order of Police was already pissed over the noninterference rules for CO/WA, and the Administration not talking to them about the nomination just provoked them further.
This comes back to the point I keep making with Hedgie's First Rule Of Politics: the goal of politics is to enact policy. And no, I'm not pissed at Adegbile - but I'm disappointed in the Administration for making such an unforced error, as the GOP was going to fight any appointment to this position tooth and nail, but they got a shiny bat to beat the Administration with thanks to this. And I'm further aggravated with the left, because it would be nice if they could be honest with themselves and acknowledge that, yes, this particular case is a festering shitpile, and they had a role in making it that way.
I consider drone strikes to be a pretty serious civil rights failure of our generation, for example, and no one has gone to bat harder for those violations than the members of Obama's administration.
As applied, they are both! And I'm upset about both dimensions of it!
The analysis rightly starts with the fact that everyone has a basic right to live without being unjustly killed.
And we are unjustly killing an awful lot of people, and this fact is leading to counterproductive foreign policy results even if that is all that one wants to focus on.
Who was 'responsible' for the Mumia case is just irrelevant to the principle that everyone here was articulating, namely, that attorneys are not only not responsible for the crimes of their clients, but rather are under a legal and ethical obligation to provide their clients with competent defense. Of course, Mumia was not even his client; he wrote some brief on his behalf. Taking that to be a reason to torpedo him is unprincipled, and, frankly, from a body composed mostly of lawyers, also ruthlessly dishonest--they know these things as much as anyone.
I definitely agree with this and as far as I know Obama does too but apparently the intel committee doesn't trust the military to do as well.
The real issue is claiming the legal right to kill anyone they want whenever and wherever they want. Yes I know governments have always done scummy vile things, but claiming that it's perfectly OK is an ominous development.
It's hard to deny that the Obama administration has cheerfully and enthusiastically led the charge against civil liberty, privacy and government accountability, closely followed by the rest of the West. And it's even harder to understand the necessity; we face no new existential threats, and it's unclear how these changes would help vs the ones we do face.
This part I don't agree with but can absolutely respect as an opinion. It's a major balancing act between security and freedom and personally I lean towards security in this area. I don't think the president should have unchecked, limitless authority to do so but I do definitely want him to be able to. I would agree that the current set up is unsatisfactory.
I was under the impression that while killing people abroad may be nothing new, the drone program represents a remarkable scaling up of our assassination programs. The sheer number of people killed by drones in Yemen, Pakistan, and etc. is unlike anything we've done before--at least, anything we've done directly, as opposed to doing through friendly regimes / guerrilla groups, etc., though you can question the significance of that distinction. Anyhow, that has nothing to do with whether flying death robots deliver it, but does represent a novel and potentially alarming development.
I think it's reasonable to ask what the surveillance is supposed to be protecting us from. Terrorists? You're more likely to be hit by lightning than killed by a terrorist in the US. You could take all the money we spend on domestic surveillance and throw it into a fire in Times Square, and you'd probably still get a better ROI in terms of lives saved if you prevent a few homeless people from freezing to death. All without stomping on civil liberties.
They can fuck right off on this. They have no credibility on these matters, especially when they're punishing a man who was only doing his job.
The GOP was going to fight this with all they had even if he had been a extreme right wing lawyer. There's no winning with them.
The left does have shitpiles, this isn't a good example for one. Any person the left politically supports would go through the same ringer. If we do what you're talking about all we have left are appointees that are centrist or conservatives whenever the Democrats get into the White House. The government has enough of those political appointments already.
edit: Elisabeth Warren went through some shit, too. I'm glad the administration tried with her.
I do think there's some psychological effect where you're having war made on you with a total inability to fight back in a meaningful way that really pisses people off and probably makes them more likely to want to fight back in other ways (i.e. terrorism). But that's speculative.
EDIT: Not to say that's different than say, a B-2 strike or even most bombing campaigns, considering our air superiority. But we usually have to declare those instead of making a wide swathe of the globe a free fire zone. As I say, they're a shitty foreign policy.
And if they were claiming that, that would be a problem. But as we've discussed in past Administration threads, they're not. The people targeted are ranking members in an organization that we are quite literally at war with, which makes them legitimate military targets by the laws of war.
We all sledged Bush for ignoring this little procedural nicety, and rightly so, because it was bullshit then and it has not stopped being bullshit now just because we like some other things Obama did.
Right now, Obama's administration has claimed the legitimate right to declare you a "ranking member in an organization that we are quite literally at war with", have you killed, and anyone who doesn't agree can fuck right off. There is no penalty for making a mistake, no oversight to prevent abuse, no accountability to ensure that whatever procedures exist are followed, no process to appeal a decision and nodefinition of what consitutes "ranking members in an organization that we are quite literally at war with".
Would you be so sanguine with the administration having this power if Cheney was president? Or Rick Santorum? Or, God save us, someone like Bachman or Palin?
Additionally, as we've seen in the last few years, there is now zero moral justification to object to the even more flagrant abuses committed by other nations like Russia and China. The brakes are off; the restraining effect of the West at least pretending to play nice has been thrown away. if the greatest nation on earth openly declares that acting like a nasty little tin-pot banana republic dictatorship, then the actual tin-pot banana republic dictatorships are going to take their cue from that. There are multiple festering situations across the globe where the abdication of any moral leadership is only going to make matters worse. If we're no better than the Chinese or the Russians, why should smaller nations not align themselves with whoever offers the best deal? What argument can we offer to Bolivia or Mali or Burma?
Rights are of course abrogated all the time when there is a sufficiently good reason to do so, but we're pretty far afield of that here.
If we were killing a lot of innocent people with careless manned bombing runs and then classifying a broad swath of the innocent victims as "enemy combatants" as a matter of course, then that would be absurd and awful too.
I'm generally opposed to those as well.
Also pretty opposed to those as well.
I've never been clear on why people who disagree with me on the policy of targeted killing always emphasize the 'flying death robots' part of my opposition to raining destruction upon our enemies with flying death robots. It always seems like a dodge.
That's all entirely unrelated to the specific weapon being used, ie drones. We have killed loads of innocent people with bombing runs. If you want to be taken seriously then point out the issues about the actual policy you're upset about. Phoenix D points out valid problems with policy. You point at a decked out RC plane. Get rid of the drones and the policy still exists and is still a problem.
I'm rather glad to see this go into effect since FLSA is not nearly as strong as it needs to be when it comes to issues of wage theft and abloo. However, I am rather curious as to why this wasn't on one of those Day 1 executive order list of things like all the other stuff that changes once the Presidency flips (global gag order, &c.). Better late than never, but still.
What?
I've said several times now, including in your quote of me, that the drones themselves have never been my problem.
I have pointed out several specific objections to the program that have nothing to do with the weapon being used.
Your very first post in this thread is literally only about drone strikes.