by Jason Stotts
It should be clear to my readers that I have no love for our current president (nor for our last one, for that matter). I talked about some of my problems in “Obama and the Path to Tyranny” and now even more more people are fed up with the administration.
Buzzfeed has an amazing quiz that challenges you to decide whether what you’re reading is from George Orwell’s 1984 or from Obama. Sadly, it’s hard to tell anymore!
This is partly in response to new information that not only is Obama doing all of the terrible things he has been (see “Obama and the Path to Tyranny“), he’s also completely violated the rights of citizens by seizing the phone records of Verizon customers, even those who have not been suspected of any crimes. See the Washington Post story U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program.
Even the very liberal New York Times has now come out against Obama:
Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
The New York Times is right, this administration has now lost all credibility, not just on this issue, but across the board. No president has had this many serious concurrent scandals and who knows how many more are yet to come to light.
Let us be clear: this administration is corrupt and is actively violating the rights of its citizens. We, the people, need to take a stand and say that the government has transgressed its bounds and must be restrained. We can’t leave it to our politicians, I think we have seen that both the Republicans and the Democrats are perfectly willing to violate rights in order to meet their political agendas. We need to start by impeaching Obama and working to restore our system of constitutionally limited government that works for the people, not against us.