Let me start this post by highly recommending two very good posts on the continuing issues surrounding the President's recent posturing on a number of related issues of torture, gitmo, detention without trial, release of information and pictures of torture in the Bush days, offering protective cover for those who actually did torture, while calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques." This is all part of something that is painful to watch: the sacrifice of our nation's fundamental values for the sake of pragmatism and compromise, as well as for the unstated sake of accruing even more power to the Executive.
The first is by BBE:
http://open.salon.com/blog/behind_blue_eyes/2009/05/22/obama_proposes_indefinite_preventive_detention_without_trial
The second is an excellent post by Libertarius intended to put these actions in the context of the national ideals and the defense of them.
http://open.salon.com/blog/libertarius/2009/05/22/what_does_it_mean_to_defend_america
This is my fifth post on these issues. What follows is an expansion of a comment I made to Libertarius' post. I made the comment after reading his excellent post and BBEs post and all of the comments on it. I think I have a pretty good idea of how this issue is playing out here on Open Salon.
My intention with publishing these thoughts is to continue to broaden this conversation by hopefully adding new voices to it.
I think that this series of issues that we have watched develop over the last month have the potential to affect the kind of America that we will have in the coming years. What happens now can define what we actually believe, what our national values will be for the coming decades.
My problem is that we are a country of ideals, as Libertarius so clearly points out, including the fundamental ideal of the rule of law. We are either a nation of laws, or we are not.
What is deeply problematic for me is that I did several posts last fall about the likely disenchantment of the far left who assumed that Obama shared their positions. I argued that they would be disappointed in him because he was fundamentally a left center pragmatist.
What I did not foresee at all was that he would so thoroughly trash fundamental democratic principles in such areas as FISA, torture, unlawful detention, rendition, gitmo, trading Iraq for Afghanistan and closing out neither, and giving the Wall Street bailouts to the very people who caused the problem. The list is much longer than this, but for the purpose of this post these issues can serve to center the discussion.
Pragmatism is one thing when dealing with the possible in trying to get bills passed or compromising on specific issues to move something off of a stalemate. But pragmatism at the expense of our ideals and principles is not pragmatism, it is an unforgivable lack of a fundamental moral compass as to what it means to be a nation that holds certain ideals to be more sacred than enhancing the power of the one who happens to occupy the Presidency.
Let no one misunderstand me. I was and am a supporter of the President. I was a supporter of Obama from the time he announced his candidacy. I cannot remember a time that I was more proud of the nation and happy for a candidate to win than I was when Obama won the election. And I still support him on 90+% of the programs that he wants.
But his Presidency is starting to look like the Imperial Presidency writ large. On literally none of the policies that enhance the power of the Presidency over the other units in our system of checks and balances has Obama changed a thing.
Even on the issue of torture all he has said is that "my Administration will not use torture." Please keep in mind that was exactly what the Bush Administration said, and what Cheney is saying now about the Bush Administration.
President Obama's failure to uphold fundamental principles of justice and stand up for the basic ideals of this nation is potentially far more dangerous than the the actions of the bumbling fumbling dolt named George W. Bush.
Our current situation is more dangerous because Obama has a silver tongue and the things we talk about here on OS are either not being talked about by the general public, or if the public is even aware of these issues, they are going right over the head of the people who continue to support the President by overwhelming numbers in poll after poll.
For example these issues do not make the papers or even enter into the minds of the people here in rural America where I live, and I believe it likely that they are not on the minds of most of working and middle class Americans as well, urban as well as rural.
The ordinary folks who believe in Obama are worried about their jobs, their mortgages, their ability to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. They are not wondering whether our fundamental values are being eroded.
The President has managed to frame these issues in such a way that he always sounds reasonable, that he is moving the nation into a more legally tenable position, and that he is doing this to change the way things were done in the past eight years.
Very few in the general public are going to parse those words and realize how little he is really doing in the area of affording detainees the basic rights of a trial, having a willingness to investigate and prosecute if necessary those who approved and those who did torture in the past, or to even release photos of tortures that were perpetrated by our own military and civilian operatives.
From the President's perspective this is the pragmatic thing to do: cover the issues in silver words while giving up nothing in the way of power or future options. What is singularly amazing is that this is being done by a former professor of Constitutional Law.
And he knows, and expects, that we will likely allow all of this to be couched in terms of simple politics. What inevitably happens in situations like this is that issues of fundamental ethics and morality which lie at the heart of the nation's values get transformed into a simple political arguments, left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative.
That these issues rise above politics is not well understood. Even here on OS many are saying that we are being disloyal to Obama if we raise these issues. "Give him time" is argued as the right response to these issues. From a simple political point of view that is a reasonable point to make.
But I would argue that this is not simply an issue of "politics." When fundamental principles are on the line "time" is never the issue. Any time is the right time to call out those who would either trash or ignore those principles.
In a land founded on ideals of fundamental ethics and morality, a nation dedicated to preserving the very core values that define it, it is never right to wait until a "good time" to insist that those ideals be upheld, even if it is inconvenient, or embarrassing, or if it takes our eyes off of other things. In this nation built upon a core of fundamental values "time" cannot be the issue. Doing the right thing is the only issue that matters.
Monte
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