Rachel Maddow loses credibility

A bit of sensational reporting on the evil ways of president Obama and his quest to throw away the bill of rights as quickly as carbon-based energy generation over at CNBC with a segment of the Rachel Maddow show a couple of weeks ago. I watched this little video clip of that segment and couldn't help but get angry with our president. (This has to do with Obama's speech a few weeks ago regarding how to handle the political prisoners at GTMO.)

But wait just a minute. In an effort to sound off on that little clip, I searched for the transcript of the speech and found it here, provided by McClatchyDC.com. I figured I could skim through, find the incriminating words (already in text) and post them here. Not quite.

It turns out, the adored Rachel Maddow has lost real credibility with me. Slick editing? I don't know. The content and tone of the speech by our president are nothing like what Maddow would have us believe. In fact, through the entire speech, I only found a couple of paragraphs of scattered lingo within Obama's speech that could be built into such controversy. (Don't get me wrong--I see no way of reconciling detention of any sorts of suspects, indefinitely, without charges, trial, conviction, and sentencing--with the constitution and bill of rights.)

What's the big fuss, then? Evidently, Maddow's agenda is apparently more driven to malign the president than to report--or opine upon--the facts. That's not something I need.

I wonder how many people are getting their "news" from sources such as Maddow? Maybe this is the source behind so many of those emails going around from the right (without any fact-checking)?

As for me--no thanks, Ms. Maddow. I guess you can't believe everything you see on the internet TV.

"It was said during the presidential campaign that one of the candidates was running for George W. Bush’s third term. Did you think it was Obama?"

That line was pulled from this article at MWC News. Interesting. So many people during this last election were filled with so much hope in one of the two mainstream candidates--either for the liberal Messiah on the left or the hard-liner hero on the right. I watched in utter disgust, as only thin lines separated the true essence of each candidate. Sure, the news did their duty in expanding the crack in the sidewalk to the size of the Grand Canyon to point out such stark contrasts between the two, but if you stop and think, the candidates were both headed in the same direction--away from freedom and liberty and toward increases in state power. How they planned to do this hardly matters, for the destination is the same.

Now some of the liberals watching the scene with less fog in their eyes are sinking into the inevitable disillusion of following a false prophet. They've been betrayed, to be sure, just as they were in 2006 when the Democrats regained the majority in House and Senate. This is the same old story, but is happening to the supporters on the left at the exectutive level this time. And I'm increasingly running across articles bemoaning this fact of late. More from the MWC article here:

Obama has clearly adopted not only Bush’s policies, but also his premise: that the United States is in a war in which the world is the battlefield and restraints on the power of government are a luxury we can’t afford. He has dropped the more realistic view that acts of terrorism are crimes — provoked by years of U.S. intervention — that can be dealt with through normal procedures that protect basic freedoms.

It is instructive that the neoconservatives who gave us the Bush war program are now delighted with Obama’s policies, including his escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This all should be troubling to anyone who thinks elections can bring needed change. Presidents come and go, with little obvious effect on foreign policy, no matter what they say during their campaigns. Republican and Democrat, right and left — those terms are more about style than substance. In subtle ways and with staunch corporate media support, the system maintained by the ruling elite ensures that no successful national candidate will deviate too far from its plumb line. The marginalization of real anti-war candidates during the 2008 election was just the latest demonstration.

Funny--I've been thinking exactly the same thing. Tyranny hides behind the strangest masks.

Promises, promises...

I missed a promise in my "Liars" post from a while back. Really, I didn't think it would be difficult for this one to be kept. This involves posting of considered bills for citizens to view up to five days before rushing it forward with a presidential signature, as seen in this article from The Washington Times (as excerpted below):

During the campaign and again during the transition, Mr. Obama said opening bills up for public comment was a way of fighting back against special interests' control of the process.

"When there's a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government's doing," Mr. Obama said in a major campaign speech laying out his goals for transparency.

Maybe the IT department at the White House is finding this task a bit too daunting? Maybe the former Bush administration decided to keep the FTP password for the web site a secret as an exit joke?

Or maybe Obama is simply not interested in keeping this promise for other reasons. It would, of course, be inconvenient if citizens could call their lawmakers and chief executive to account by flagging all the pork (and other stupid ideas) in bills before they were included in permanent law, wouldn't it? Really, why would any of our politicians actually decide to opt-in--voluntarily--to any form of accountability? That's just silly. They're servants of the citizens, after all, and not "rulers".

Or wait--maybe I've got that backwards in this government ostensibly of, by, and for the people.