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    Taking Apart Cornel West's Boilerplate Mantra That President Obama Is A Baby Killer

    By Wattree on Thu, 03/19/2015 - 12:53pm |

    Beneath the Spin*Eric L. Wattree

    Taking Apart Cornel West's Boilerplate Mantra That President Obama Is A Baby Killer

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    Cornel was recently on the David Letterman show spewing what has become his boilerplate mantra about President Obama being a baby killer again. Most Americans understand why President Obama think it necessary to use drones in Afghanistan, because they're thinkers. Cornel West is not - he's a regurgitator. His entire reputation is built around his ability to regurgitate the words of dead White men. That's not intellect. Intellect is having the ability to take the information being regurgitated and manipulating it in new and creative ways. Here are a few things that most of us clearly recognize but West is far too bitter, and/or shallow-minded, to see:
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    Much like Ben Carson and Tavis Smiley,  Cornel West doesn't seem to recognize that he's destroyed his public image by allowing his self-serving agenda to take precedence over his common sense. Also like the two gentleman previously mentioned, he's dropped like a rock from a stellar personality that the Black community pointed to with pride, to a public embarrassment that many Black people wish would simply go away. 
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    One of the reasons that's the case with all three of these gentlemen are their public pronouncements that tend to negate the very intellectual excellence in which the Black community took such pride. In the case of West, he's mortally wounded his legacy in the Black community with his reckless, unscholarly, and unsubstantiated rants about President Obama. He also tends to be inconsistent. For example, while responding to a criticism lodged against him by comedian, Steve Harvey, he said, "When you are trying to talk about issues that affect the people, name calling gets in the way. Name-calling is nothing but another weapon of mass distraction."  Then later, he goes on to call President Obama - the first Black president of the United States - "a drone president, and a baby killer."  So in his own words, he's become "a weapon of mass distraction" - and one of the GOP's most effective weapons, a valuable tool for  undermining the interests of the very people that he claims to love so dearly.

     
    About Drones


    When Tavis Smiley and Cornel West began to lose the confidence of the Black community, they tried to broaden their constituency by refocusing their criticism of President Obama from poverty to the war in Afghanistan. Time.com reported West as saying in 2012 that he didn’t vote. "I couldn’t vote for a war criminal," he said, calling Obama’s administration a "drone presidency."
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    While I don't like killing machines either, I've had to take into account the fact that Obama is charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that Al Qaeda, ISIS, or no other terrorist group manages to get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - and let us not forget that they located Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan living comfortably, and casually, within the shadow of that arsenal. So while West would have us believe that Obama is in Afghanistan just killing people for the hell of it, or for the oil companies, that’s a myth. He’s trying to make sure that YOUR family is not blown up by angry religious fanatics who think that God will bless them if they blow up the United States.
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    So while war, and killing, is an ugly business, it is very much a reality in the world we live in. So as I see it, if we have to lob missiles into an area filled with innocent people - since hiding behind human shields seems to be the terrorists' preferred mode of defense - the drone is a far better alternative than simply firing missiles and such blindly.
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    Consider this. If you were an Afghan and lived next door to a terrorist, would want to have someone blindly firing missiles in your direction, possibly taking out your home and family, or maybe even the entire town just to get one man, or would you rather they sent in drones with television cameras where they can specifically target the person they’re after? One drone pilot said that they even wait for the target’s family to leave the house before they fire a missile to take out the target. So the fact is, if you have to go to war, drones often SAVE lives.

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    So what is West jumping up and down about? This is one of the reasons that I often question the popular belief that West has such a powerful intellect. It’s one thing to have the ability to remember and regurgitate the words of dead White men, and yet another to be able to think for yourself and connect the dots. So on this issue, West is either grossly uninformed, has an inability to connect the dots, or he’s purposely trying to mislead the people (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/drone-pilots-waiting-for-a-kill-sho...).
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    Cornel West's Gargantuous Ego

    .The problem is, Cornel West has evolved into a bad joke - a raving hypocritical egomaniac and intellectual fraud -  and I know that with certainty, because I've done over 30 articles on him and his former road dawg, Tavis Smiley, so I've become one of the world's greatest authorities on both of them (If you ever want to know about either one of those two, just combine my name and theirs in Google).
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    West seems to be so envious of President Obama that it's driven him out of his mind.  I think part of the problem is, West was a big shot Ivy League professor when Barack Obama was a skinny little college student, but then, Obama had the nerve to butt in line to become a senator, and then President of the United States.  That drove Cornel West crazy. West can't stand ANYBODY taking him out of the limelight - he even criticized Jay-Z's partial ownership of a sports team.  How dare Jay-Z be so arrogant! Doesn't he know that CORNEL WEST is the only Black man with gorilla nuts around here!!!? He's also gone after just about every Black news commentator on television - Al Sharpton, Melessa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson - and every one of them has more sense than he does. The man is simply a clueless egomaniac who thinks that Moses ordered the Red Sea to scoot over so Cornel West could take center stage. His attitude seems to suggest, "Who do you think you are, trying to upstage me? I'm Cornel West! I'm right up there with White folks, so stay in yo place, boy! - I mean, my dear and precious brother." He's become mesmerized by his own myth.
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    And what about his reputation as a scholar?  A true scholar - or even an efficient-thinking high school student - should know that you never base your opinions on unsubstantiated assumptions. Yet, West is ALWAYS going around talking about what's on Obama's mind. How in the hell does he know what Obama is thinking!!!? He can't read Obama's mind - unless God gave him that skill as part of West's "Black prophetic tradition" and didn't tell anybody.  If he was as qualified to think as Barack Obama HE'D be president. But just the mere thought of that is an hilariously bad joke, because just like many Republicans, he carries himself like a recklessly irate child having a tantrum in a supermarket. Agree with him or not, President Obama is a thoughtful adult, while Cornel West thinks with the inefficiency of a irresponsible and reckless child. So he couldn't possibly know what's on Barack Obama's mind.
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    I've made some serious allegations here, and on the surface it may seem like I'm doing the very same thing to Cornel West that he's doing to President Obama. But there's one huge difference. Unlike Cornel, my allegations are not just hyperbole, innuendo, and ad hominem attacks. My allegations and criticism of Cornel West are based on facts that I can fully substantiate, in the fact is, Cornel West is one of the major reasons the poor (who he claims to love so dearly) are in the situation they're in.
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    After Ralph Nader was rejected for the 2000 presidential nomination by the Democratic voters, instead of acknowledging his rejection and falling into line to help defeat the Republicans, Nader went into a petulant snit and ran as a third party candidate. It was clear that he purposely ran as a third party candidate with the mean-spirited intent of sabotaging the Democratic effort, because third parties never win; the only purpose that third parties ever serve is to help elect the people that you like least, because they divide the vote of like-minded people.
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    Cornel West joined Nader in this foolish - or treacherous, you make the determination - campaign, and as a result, George W. Bush won the election over Al Gore by winning Florida by a mere 537 votes. The Nader/West coalition peeled off 97,488 votes from Gore in Florida alone. So when I say that Cornel West is more than a little responsible for George W. Bush becoming President of the United States, and thus, your current economic condition, don’t take my word for it – you do the math.
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    Most people, if they were sincere, would look at the disastrous results of their activities and be devastated. After all, causing Bush to be elected was the worst possible outcome for everything West is SUPPOSE to believe in. So most people would conclude that they had made a grave error, and that they would never do anything to divide the progressive vote again. But not Cornel , he teamed up with Ralph Nader yet again in the 2012 election against Obama, and tried do the very same thing that they'd done in the 2000 election that resulted in Bush's presidency. The only thing that stopped them was this time the people weren’t buying it.
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    So as I pointed out above, either Cornel West is a grossly inefficient thinker, or there's a more malevolent agenda afoot. Did you hear him calling George W. Bush a baby killer?  Hmmm . . .
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    The Gross Hypocrisy of Cornel West
     

    In addition to Cornel's outlandish public stupidity, he's also a hypocrite.  West said, “Regardless of your popularity, where’s your [Obama's] integrity?” Where's West's integrity?  He got a lot of publicity for going to Ferguson and being arrested, but doing 3 minutes in jail was worth it to him for the photo op and all of the valuable publicity. He was on a book tour, and he was going around the country undermining the Democratic efforts in the midterm elections at the time, so if they wouldn't have arrested him, just like they arrested those White folks, Cornel West would have filed a discrimination suit against the city - "Why couldn't I go to jail, just like those White folks?"
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    On the other hand, where was he and Tavis Smiley during the demonstrations against Tavis Smiley's benefactor, Walmart? In spite of the fact that Smiley and West profess to be so concerned about the poor that they rode all across the country on a bus ranting about it  (again, during the 2012 election, thereby, helping the Republican Party - they tend to engage in this sort of Democratic sabotage every election)  they've ducked the Walmart demonstrations three (count 'em, 3) years in a row - and one demonstration was being held at a Walmart two blocks from Smiley's office! And Walmart is THE most egregious abuser of the working poor in America. I predicted, in print, two years in a row, that they weren't  going to show up - and sure enough, I was right:
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    " Unlike most TV hosts, who simply do their jobs and collect a paycheck from a network, Smiley has to go out and raise most of the money for his program, which costs between $7 million and $8 million a year to produce. PBS generally contributes about $1 million of that sum. The rest comes from corporate sponsors, which Smiley has to round up himself.
    "The sluggish economy and reduced corporate spending have threatened the show's viability. But luckily for Smiley, Wal-Mart, a longtime sponsor, stepped up again, this time with a three-year commitment. (PBS can only offer a maximum of two years on renewals because, as a government-supported entity, it must be periodically authorized by Congress.) But Wal-Mart covers only about a quarter of the costs" - Los Angeles Times  (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/12/entertainment/la-et-st-tavis-smiley-pbs-20131212).
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    And then there was Tavis Smiley's involvement in the Wells Fargo "Ghetto Scam," where over 30,000 minorities lost their homes and life savings. The Department of Justice said it was the second largest housing discrimination case in this nation's history. Wells Fargo ended up having to pay $175 million to settle the case, and Cornel West was attached at the hip with Tavis Smiley during that time. Yet, we didn't hear a "mumblin word" from West about the scandal ( http://wattree.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-question-for-both-tavis-smiley-and.html).
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    So where is Cornel West's integrity? Both Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have fallen victim to a very fundamental and common-sense rule of life - Before you point your finger at others, you should smell it first.
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    RELATED CONTENT
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    A QUESTION FOR BOTH TAVIS SMILEY AND CORNEL WEST
    http://wattree.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-question-for-both-tavis-smiley-and...
     

    .
    Eric L. Wattree
    Http://wattree.blogspot.com
    [email protected]
    Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
    .
    Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

    Comments

    We live in the era of young people protesting Stop and Frisk, BlackLivesMatter, HandsUpDontShoot, Moral Mondays, and the protests after the arrest of Martese Johnson. the future is in good hands. Note the outpouring at the Selma commemoration and the amount of education went on during the event. Cornel's contribution to these events has been to show up specifically to get arrested in Ferguson. He has done nothing of substance.

    West is on the Rolodex of late night TV because the powers that be on late night TV don''t have a real connection with the black community. Cornel provides aid and comfort to the Republicans and reactionaries by focusing on the President while giving fleeting attention to the racism coming from the GOP.

    The GOP held Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, refuse to allow a vote on Loretta Lynch, refuse to repair the damage done by SCOTUS  the Voting Rights Act, and elected the guy who appeared at a David Duke rally to be their number three in the House. They are cheerleading a war with Iran. the myopic West plcaes these events as an afterthought.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 12:10pm

    I totally agree, RM.
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    Like he said himself, he's a distraction.


    by Wattree on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 11:31pm

    If you were an Afghan and lived next door to a terrorist, would want to have someone blindly firing missiles in your direction, possibly taking out your home and family, or maybe even the entire town just to get one man, or would you rather they sent in drones with television cameras where they can specifically target the person they’re after? One drone pilot said that they even wait for the target’s family to leave the house before they fire a missile to take out the target. So the fact is, if you have to go to war, drones often SAVE lives.

    Of course they say that. They're liars. They're in the drone business, and their job is to kill people with drones. "Collateral damage" is just an inconvenient fact.

    Just like cigarette companies will tell you that cigarettes don't cause cancer and heart disease, and taser companies will tell you tasers don't kill, despite the clear evidence that they do. What did they say in Ferguson? Everyone plays CYA and ludicrous denial

    How you can pretend that the US government is successful at targeted drone killings when there have been so many reports of civilian killings, I've no clue, except that you're a committed apologist for Obama, so doesn't matter if you ignore evidence or not. As Groucho Marx said, "Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"

    Try these "wait for the target's family to leave the house" details:

    41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground

    New analysis of data conducted by human rights group Reprieve shared with the Guardian, raises questions about accuracy of intelligence guiding ‘precise’ strikes

    ‘Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise.’ But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them.’ Photograph: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

    in New York

    Monday 24 November 2014 16.55 GMT

    The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

    Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

    However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

    Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

    A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

    Reprieve, sifting through reports compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, examined cases in which specific people were targeted by drones multiple times. Their data, shared with the Guardian, raises questions about the accuracy of US intelligence guiding strikes that US officials describe using words like “clinical” and “precise.”

    The analysis is a partial estimate of the damage wrought by Obama’s favored weapon of war, a tool he and his administration describe as far more precise than more familiar instruments of land or air power.

    “Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded the group’s study.

    Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets.

    In Yemen, 17 named men were targeted multiple times. Strikes on them killed 273 people, at least seven of them children. At least four of the targets are still alive.

    Available data for the 41 men targeted for drone strikes across both countries indicate that each of them was reported killed multiple times. Seven of them are believed to still be alive. The status of another, Haji Omar, is unknown. Abu Ubaidah al-Masri, whom drones targeted three times, later died from natural causes, believed to be hepatitis.... [read on by clicking the URL]

    Another Guardian report:

    The US and British militaries insist that this is an expert program, but it's curious that they feel the need to deliver faulty information, few or no statistics about civilian deaths and twisted technology reports on the capabilities of our UAVs. These specific incidents are not isolated, and the civilian casualty rate has not changed, despite what our defense representatives might like to tell us.

    What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle.

     

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 1:53pm

    The alternatives to drones are equally bad with high rates of displacements of civilian populations

    http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-alternative-to-us-drone-st...

    What is your solution?


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 3:32pm

    Screw that - not picking up on the bait-and-switch.

    Wattree declared:

    "would you rather they sent in drones with television cameras where they can specifically target the person they’re after?" - the Guardian articles note that drones are not nearly this accurate, and result in thousands of collateral civilian deaths for the dozens of intended target.

    "[Obama]’s trying to make sure that YOUR family is not blown up by angry religious fanatics who think that God will bless them if they blow up the United States." - this is so ugly and deceitful, Wattree might be gunning for a position on Fox news. No, there are no Pakistanis in Waziristan who threaten my family in any way, and our involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan only incites the level of hatred towards the US in what would otherwise be a local conflict. Additionally, bin Laden was living not in Waziristan, but in a suburb of Lahore (or Islamabad, forget which), probably with the knowledge of the Pakistani military. So droning Waziristan has no effect on Al Qaeda international activity.

    "So as I see it, if we have to lob missiles into an area filled with innocent people - since hiding behind human shields seems to be the terrorists' preferred mode of defense - the drone is a far better alternative than simply firing missiles and such blindly." - sure, the drone is better than the atom bomb or biological weapons as well. And we know from Vietnam that sometimes we have to wipe out the village to save it, amirite, amirite?  Lessee, the US military runs on $700 billion a year - perhaps it can think out of the box and come up with a better method to assist Pakistan in dealing with terrorists than lobbing in missiles of whatever sort that kill an inordinate number of civilians.

    Crack gangs in Compton and East St. Louis will of course use human shields as well - should we be lobbing drones into those areas to make it easier on police officers and help protect my family from street thugs carrying AK-47s?  Or would you expect a bit more humane, thought-out, efficient, and rewarding tactics, including those that might improve our reputation among people we presume to convert to reason and democracy?


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 4:24pm

    You end by saying we should have a more thought out process and avoid what that process might be. Drones seem to be the best of a group of bad options. I haven't seen multiple hostage taking events with AK-47 toting gang members.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 4:45pm

    Evidently you didn't get the memo?.

    They hate our freedoms

    They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.


    by Resistance on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 3:41pm

    I'm going to make an exception and respond to you this one time, Peracles.
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    Innocent people are maimed and killed in every war. That's what makes war so horrible.  But going to war is a reality in this world, and the point is, President Obama is doing everything in his power to limit senseless deaths, while carrying out his responsibility of protecting America from nuclear annihilation as a result of terrorists getting their hands on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. So haters are trying to hold him to a standard that no other president has EVER been held to. How many innocent people do you think President Truman Kill when he dropped not one, but TWO atomic bombs on Japan?
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    And by the way, President Obama doesn't need an apologist, because he is clearly one of the greatest presidents in the history of this country, and that fact alone is what's driving bigots out of their minds, because he's dragging the claim of White superiority through the mud - just like I do, every chance I get. 
    .


    by Wattree on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 11:53pm

    Many people then and now question Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs. You don't have to be a hater to question Truman or Obama. I have ambivalent feelings about our drone assassination project. Collateral damage happens in wars but the more I learn about drone assassination it's beginning to seem as though the collateral damage exceeds the targets killed. If true I'm uncomfortable with that. There's too much secrecy in the program to draw a firm conclusion and I'm uncomfortable with that as well.


    by ocean-kat on Mon, 03/23/2015 - 12:16am

    "carrying out his responsibility of protecting America from nuclear annihilation as a result of terrorists getting their hands on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal."

    You're such a fear-monger. Do you really think it's so simple to grab a nuclear missile, put it in your backback and fly to the US? My family is not threated by anything they do in Waziristan. I was for our invasion of Afghanistan, we took care of the state hosting of Al Qaeda to attack us, now no reason to stick around and terrorize these people.

    There are no nukes in Yemen or Somalia - what's our excuse for droning civilians there?

    Qaddafi didn't have nukes nor was he trying to obtain them. What was our good reason for overthrowing him and throwing that country into chaos? Yes, his troops killed perhaps 500 civilians and rebels killed a few hundred civilians - even the NATO airstrikes killed civilians plus 100+ rebel troops - so much for our "smart bombs" - but nothing like the killing that's going on now. Instead our intervention launched a civil war, empowering the Islamic militants who've now taken over the government to avail themselves of the oil money and arms and institute Sharia law - much closer to Italy's toe than Pakistan is. Any worries, Wattree?  Or Obama's got it all under control?

    But I guess there was no other way - Obama's just doing his best, don't criticize him (or HIllary as well for this one - seems she was a major backer of intervention).

    The US' idea of easy regime change and rebel management from the air is an illusion - we haven't been able to do it in 14 years in Afghanistan where we have boots on the ground, and tossing missiles across the border into Pakistan just gives us an illusion of control to go along with our fantasy of limited civilian deaths. As long as we don't report them, presumably they didn't happen, like that tree falling in the woods no one hears.

    [PS - please keep your racial issues out of this - this is simply about policy. I hold Hillary as much to blame in the Libya case as Obama, as it seems she pushed hard for that strategy - will reverse my sentiment if any evidence to the contrary]

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/23/2015 - 2:01am

    Sending in special forces to arrest select terrorists does not seem to be a variable option. Sending in a large number of frankly armed ground forces might lead to more carnage. Doing nothing would lead to terrorist groups expanding their influence in the region. which decision results in the fewest causalities is something that will never be fully resolved. So label Obama a baby-killer to hide the fact that you don't have any solutions and are glad that you are not in a position to have to make a decision.There are people chomping at the bit to force a show down with Iran. The baby-killer Obama is trying to use diplomacy. 

    James Risen, the NYT reporter who Holder was supposed to be chomping at the bit to imprison is a free man. Risen never went to prison, yet Risen labels Obama the biggest threat to journalism ever. Interesting.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/25/2015 - 5:04pm

    Risen wasted 7 years of his life avoiding prison or testifying against a source. Whether Obama is "the biggest threat" or simply a very negative effect, it's a big step backwards for American press freedom. From the NY Times:

    Mr. Kurtzberg, a lawyer with Cahill Gordon & Reindel, said that while Mr. Risen ultimately may not have to testify, the Justice Department used the case to create court precedent that could be used to force journalists to testify in the future.

    “I worry about future administrations,” he said. “Now there’s bad precedent, and not every executive branch in the future will exercise their discretion the way this one did. It didn’t have to go this way.”


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/25/2015 - 5:24pm

    Compared to previous Presidents, how many reporters in the United States have been imprisoned by Obama?


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/25/2015 - 5:39pm

    ?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/25/2015 - 5:44pm

    No journalist has gone to jail under Obama and Holder.

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/25/2015 - 6:20pm

    This is a joke - he was under threat of arrest for 7 fucking years if he didn't reveal his sources. He wasted lots of time and resources. The DoJ tapped 30-50 reporters in pursuing this, drastically changing the ground rules on "freedom of the press" and putting a huge freeze on how reporters will do business in the future.

    The DoJ and Chamber of Commerce actively refer corporate hackers to take down those who oppose US policies, including Glenn Greenwald (via Palantir, HBGary, Berico & other corporates, with Hunton & Williams being their pimp). Of course Obama's group denies this and cuts off any hacker who reveals this private hacking.

    Lenny Bruce spent his last 5 years before suicide fighting off obscenity harassment. You don't have to go to jail - they just have to be able to ruin your life or intimidate you into shutting up.

    Points for one more suck-up apologist defense. Obama hasn't used thumb locks either. Democracy lives.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/26/2015 - 1:47am

    So you agree that he didn't go to jail. You link to an article that says a company utilizing spy software apologized to Glenn Greenwald for allowing a business partner to spy on Greenwald. The company did this because the government wouldn't work with a company that allowed the software to be used against Greenwald. However we can assume that the government didn't care that the software was used against Greenwald because Chamber of Commerce .......

    GW and Bill Clinton actually sent folks to jail. So yeah, Obama is the worse. Rinse, repeat.

    BTW, GW got the Risen ball rolling in 2006.


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 03/26/2015 - 8:21am

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