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The New (and On Notice) Obama Thread
Posts
The pardoning system isn't wrong, it was how it was used with Nixon - which got shielded a criminal president from prosecution. Pardoning shouldn't be used to protect criminals from justice.
Agreed.
I agree, but the proper response would have been Congress impeaching Ford.
That's not something anyone wanted.
Why not? He let Nixon get away with no consequences.
There were consequences; Nixon lost the presidency. He was saved the embarrassment of having it taken away from him sure, but his legacy will always be tainted.
His legacy being tainted means shit, we'd never any other criminals get away with that as a "sentence" for their crimes. The justice system is meant for to punish everyone, no exceptions.
Keeping this on topic I'm proud of Obama about what he's doing about Ferguson.
I kind of feel like now is the time for justice, and then after will be time for healing.
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For justice to be slow it needs to be in action to go after the criminals, we never got past the "healing" stage for Nixon. He spent the rest of his life living in luxury and died. Justice never got "easier" in punishing him. Unfortunately Obama's continued the practice with Bush and his wacky pals. He didn't pardon them but he doesn't need to - he isn't intent on prosecuting them. They'll die of old age with full lives and the nation will wonder why they're electing the next criminal assholes into office.
justice delayed is justice denied
swifter is better in this case, before the movement can actually lose its momentum
not to say that healing that needs to be done can't happen at the same time
And it's still entirely unresolved.
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Http:// pleasepaypreacher.net
Blueberrywerewlf on the Sony Anime Games Box | BluberryWerewlf on the BroBone
Lets hope they are better about it, but from my friend who actually lived in Ferguson and in MO in general, he said most of the cops down there are just aholes.
Anyway we have a thread for this so Obama, I hear we aren't putting military boots on the ground to defend people from ISIS, but Maliki is stepping down so hopefully a real government can actually get their own fucking military to do something.
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The nation was a bit torn up at the time. Ford's decision was understandable.
Naturally we might feel differently four decades on, but that's partly because we've lost the background situation, and everything is simplified to "dude did bad stuff, got off without punishment."
A high profile reformed alcoholic is not going to relapse in public with an obvious beer. That's not how alcoholism works. If he relapsed, it would be a liiiiitle more subtle than that (eg a hidden vodka bottle).
If you want to make "insinuations" about Bush relapsing, the standard conspiracy theory is that the pretzel incident was a cover up for a drunken relapse... But I think that is bollocks, too.
That's what the pretzel wants you to think. But you are ignoring the second snack behind the grassy knoll.
No, it really isn't. The road to Iran-Contra and the excesses of the Bush Administration leads from the Ford pardon. Ultimately, it would have been much healthier for the US to have gone through the pain of a Nixon trial.
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I'm more inclined to believe the president will be impeached because of that shipment stopping.
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I thought the standard thought on the pretzel incident was that he had a stroke? And I looked for those pictures online but couldn't find them so it's entirely possible my memory is faulty there.
Anyway, back to Obama, apparently some joker took a picture of the white house from the street with the ISIS/ISIL flag displayed on a smartphone, and a pro ISIL twitter account tweeted it out. The SS are "aware" of the situation.
http://news.yahoo.com/secret-aware-apparent-isis-flag-photo-front-white-233904913--abc-news-topstories.html
I think it would be unanimous.
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Obama
Obama wasn't responsible for the pretzel incident.
wasn't he?????
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
You're saying that repeated instances of racial profiling and abuse aren't the definition of widespread civil rights violations.
I've never found this to be terribly persuasive, because it rests on a kind of amorphous conviction that the trial would have played out politically exactly the way you think it would have, and the actors in later scandals would have learned exactly the lesson you think they would have learned. It's usually (although I can't speak to your particular motivation) underwritten by an attitude that if only a righteous smiting is delivered, things would really go much better with the world.
Is all of that really very knowable?
We do know what transpired after the pardon and the country suffered for it. At least with Nixon's trial America would have had some history putting its presidents under pressure for breaking the law, rather than continuing the tradition of letting corrupt presidents off without the slightest wrist-slap. Maybe the parties behind Iran-Contra and Bush would have thought twice about being shitheels, you're right we don't know - but I fail to see how it'd be worse than what we got.
edit: It's tragic that Obama's repeated this shitty policy. The country is never going to get better by not holding its elected officials accountable. The cycle will go on and there's no end in sight.
While I agree with you RE: Obama, there is a compelling case against it, considering that it will always be viewed as a "witch hunt" and set a precedent for an endless cycle of the winners persecuting the losers after every election. Of course, as it stands now, we just have the Republicans persecuting the Democrats always, so I suppose there's that.
Warren 2020
Yeah, it's tough sell to an incoming administration, one that I assume would rather just set their own political agenda than blow all their capital trying to litigate the crimes of the former administration. And there's no guarantee, as people are pretty good about hiding their tracks and falling on their sword for the higher ups. You could expend a whole lot of effort trying to say...go after Cheney, and end up getting only a lowly deputy in the end. Which is probably why Obama wasn't all that interested in doing so, though he probably wishes he had now that Cheney feels so free to badmouth everything he's doing.
Doing nothing is worse. What we have is a system that makes anyone in the higher echelons of government unofficially immune to criminal charges for crimes on a high scale. There will always be retaliation in politics, that's not a good reason to let justice become a farce, it becomes very important for those who break the law with government authority to be accountable, because we deserve better then to have a government acting like a third world country. I'd appreciate it if the Democrats got a clue about standing up to those assholes and going after criminals in their own ranks, they're the only party in the nation who can oppose war criminals on that level, the GOP isn't going to it for us. This has a side effect of tainting Obama's every Democratic president after him and the Democratic party as a whole for enabling war criminals and they're not shamed to do so - Democrats should be better than that. The country should be better than that.
There's no guarantee in anything, it's the right thing to do for the country. So what if they can't catch Cheney now, they should try their best, learn what they can to find their strengths and weaknesses in prosecuting war criminals and go forward with increasing their chances the next time it happens and it will. There's absolutely no reason why any president shouldn't commit war crimes now, that's how we got Iran Contra and Bush in the first place. You don't tell police to stop investigating a high profile criminal because they might fail, why do that with criminals that are in the highest levels of government? Going after them sooner rather than later is also better since the momentum decreases over the years and we end up with no good time to prosecute war criminals. They win, and they don't even have to get a pardon for it. That's why it's a disgrace that Obama didn't make them a priority.
That seems like a pretty low bar, but also a basically impossible one to meet. I doubt that any president since FDR* hasn't done something while in office that broke a law. International for certain (we sure do love our black ops on foreign soil), domestic too maybe.
*And I'm only limiting the timeframe because there's at least one president that it's pretty obvious could not have broken any laws (Harrison), and I don't want to spend time scouring wikipedia to remember what skeletons Taft has in his closet