Today in Obama-land: Worse than Bush? edition

How any liberal can still support President Obama is beyond me, and beyond a lot of other people, too:

1) Truth Is Not an Option: The Manning/Crowley Affair.  The president now "owns" the torture of Bradley Manning. Paul Rosenberg writes at DirtyHippies.org about the creeping authoritarianism of the president:

The big picture take-away here is that authoritarianism has gained such a pervasive foothold among the American ruling class that it is no longer even possible for a substantively non-authoritarian political position, actor, organization or movement to be recognized as such. Non- (or even anti-)authoritarian spoofs, set-pieces and fantasies by authoritarian actors of one stripe or another have completely taken over the roles of their authentically anti-authoritarian counterparts, and this is every bit as true of Obama as it is of the Tea Party, however much they may differ from one another in any number of other ways.

2) Is Obama even worse than Bush? David Swanson weighs in at Firedoglake.com:

So why not impeach Obama?  I clamored for the impeachment of Bush.  I say Obama is as bad or worse.  Why am I such a corrupt hypocrite that I haven’t built a movement to impeach Obama?  Well, I’ll tell you, as I’ve told people more times than I can count.  Obama should be impeached and convicted and removed from office.  Obama should be prosecuted for his crimes.  So should his subordinates.  So should his predecessor, his subordinates, and all corporate co-conspirators.  The reason I can’t get 20 people into the streets to demand Obama’s impeachment (and if I did, they’d want him impeached for being born in Africa to aliens from Planet Socialism) is that nobody in Congress is even pretending to give a damn.  We were able to produce a sizeable movement for impeachment when Bush was in office, because a lot of Democrats in Congress, especially in 2005 and 2006, pretended they were on our side.

3)  In Jerusalem, from the Who Is IOZ? blog:

If his psychopathic commitment to killing people hadn't already convinced you that Barack Obama shared this particular quality of being a vacant, blood-driven monster whose outward appearance as one of our own kind is no more than an act of ingenious fakery, then you may wish to consider his response to the torture of Bradley Manning, which he treats with the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate's expense report. Yeah, he assured me everything was copasetic. It's all good...

...What this episode reveals is that the most salient aspect of Barack Obama's character is that he is an asshole of the worst order. He does not delight in cruelty like his predecessor, but is grossly indifferent to it. The Ts have all been crossed. Proper procedures followed? Yes. Fine. Let's move on. I have been assured.

 4) Myles Spicer: I can believe in Obama no more. From the StarTribune op-ed page:

Like the proverbial straw that finally breaks the camel's back, the time has come to end my admiration for Barack Obama...It really started with the health care bill. In many respects the conservatives are right; it is not a particularly good law, and it was cobbled together in an atmosphere of compromise. What was needed was at least the public option, or, even better, a single payer plan. And to even get close to those two elements, we relied on Obama to lead. He sat on the sidelines, coached and commented -- but his actions to excite the public (and support his hard-fighting legislators) were nonexistent.

I had hopes he would get us out of Afghanistan quickly. This war is a travesty. It is depleting us of blood and treasure. It is a mockery of homeland security. It has virtually no redeeming national value, and now even the majority of Americans want us out. That appears to matter not to Obama, who is just another president under the influence of his generals...

5) White House calls on Congress to make ‘illegal streaming’ a felony. From Rawstory.com:

A white paper recently published by the White House's Office of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator urged Congress to make "illegal streaming" of content a felony and allow law enforcement to wiretap those suspected of being involved in copyright infringement.

...The white paper also recommended that Congress give law enforcement authorities the power to wiretap those suspected of being involved in criminal copyright and trademark offenses.

6) Not to toot my own horn (too much), but you might also check out my Bonfire of the liberals from last November.