The problem is that, in spite of his happy talk, Obama has always been as bad as Bush on the first and fourth amendments, arguably worse. Remember, he voted for telecom immunity in 2008, when he was a senator.
From the article: "In the wake of Watergate, Democrats won large majorities in both houses of Congress in the midterm elections of 1974. One of the first items on the new Congress’ agenda was to investigate the intelligence abuses of Richard Nixon and his predecessors."
From another article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/11/obama-leaves-door-o...): "Responding to the most popular inquiry on the "Open for Questions" feature of his website, Barack Obama said on Sunday that he is "evaluating" whether or not to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration, but that he was inclined to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
And even if Obama weren't so awful in this regard, Congress is not capable of doing anything with real teeth.
> Congress is not capable of doing anything with real teeth.
Congress has the power, and is legally capable. They just don't want to, for some fucking reason.
Someone explain to me why the Republicans don't get all up in arms about this mess? They could easily blame it on Obama's administration to win support for the next election. Even though they voted for the PATRIOT act, they can at least put on an act of hating that one part where everyone gets spied on. It's really not hard to put a spin on it where you can gain a ton of public support.
Instead, the ONLY people we see who are angry about the whole situation are the "fringe/crazy" ones: Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, etc... which, interestingly enough, lowers the credibility of outrage.
Meanwhile, everyone else in Congress and mainstream media proclaims Snowden a traitor.
I've never been one for conspiracies (seriously, never in my life), but I'm finding it more and more difficult to shake the feeling that there's something going on with our government and media that we're all completely unaware of. Their actions make absolutely no logical sense from an individual self-interest perspective.
> Someone explain to me why the Republicans don't get all up in arms about this mess?
Because they are the people (in some cases literally, in other cases by unbroken chain of ideological succession) that have been arguing about the inherent power of the executive and that FISA and related restrictions on that power are both unwise and unconstitutional since about 30 seconds after the furor over the Nixon abuses that led to FISA died down (some of them didn't wait that long.)
And probably because those of them that aren't on the fringes have more direct and likely documented (even if those documents are classified, for the moment) connections to the surveillance that has gone on under the last two administrations than just that political advocacy for a principal which supports surveillance.
> They could easily blame it on Obama's administration to win support for the next election.
Not if they were fully informed and fully supportive of it the whole way through the previous administration and there is documentary evidence to prove it. Kind of risky to try to make political hay out of a public demand to get to the bottom of an outrage if you know that any significant investigation is going to result in a paper trail some of whose tendrils point back to you.
Someone explain to me why the Republicans don't get all up in arms about this mess? They could easily blame it on Obama's administration to win support for the next election.
They get more traction among their base for blaming him for Benghazi, and the IRS scandal, and Obamacare.
The reason is that there's no one giving them money to protect our freedoms. There's a line of parties with billions of reasons (annually) to maintain the status quo, and they pay full-time lobbyists to protect their interests.
The problem is that, in spite of his happy talk, Obama has always been as bad as Bush on the first and fourth amendments, arguably worse. Remember, he voted for telecom immunity in 2008, when he was a senator.
From the article: "In the wake of Watergate, Democrats won large majorities in both houses of Congress in the midterm elections of 1974. One of the first items on the new Congress’ agenda was to investigate the intelligence abuses of Richard Nixon and his predecessors."
From another article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/11/obama-leaves-door-o...): "Responding to the most popular inquiry on the "Open for Questions" feature of his website, Barack Obama said on Sunday that he is "evaluating" whether or not to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration, but that he was inclined to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
And even if Obama weren't so awful in this regard, Congress is not capable of doing anything with real teeth.