Comment by malandrew
12 years ago
This. I secretly harbor this fantasy that the next Edward Snowden will be a future American president. They do everything right, cross all the t's, dot all the i's, the perfect politician, then after their first 100 days in office, they come out and publicly address all the ways that the US is hypocritical and could be the model World citizen it pretends to be.
At the end of the day, the presidency is the only position that is beyond the reproach of anyone behind the scenes that may be using their powers to pull strings. If he has ever been coerced by hidden powers, he alone could unveil them and be believed by all the non-believers. Alternatively, he could choose to promise exercise his pardon rights for people who want to expose wrongdoing but are afraid. He had the power to protect people from jail. That's the power to allow people to expose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation (unless we've gone so far down the rabbit hole that someone can make the whistleblower just disappear.)
Every President is supposed to be that kind of moral leader.
>the presidency is the only position that is beyond the reproach of anyone behind the scenes that may be using their powers to pull strings. If he has ever been coerced by hidden powers, he alone could unveil them...
If there were such hidden powers as to pull strings or coerce the president, I am not sure why we should believe that they didn't have a hand in his rise to power.
He/she would be impeached under the espionage act.
I believe that this could be workable with some preparation, the two most important of which are:
(1) the political work of defining the word "enemy". If you spend your time in your first 100 days of office trying to get the country to rally behind defining the "enemy" as actors within the US who are actively undermining the US Constitution and actors who are acting corruptly.
and
(2) the commander in chief work of defining the goals of the US military. The president is the commander in chief. If he decides that the primary goal of the US armed forces is to root out corruption and problems in the armed forces that are undermining the US Constitution in the interest of private interests.
By doing exactly both of those things and getting support for it, he has absolved himself of liability under the Espionage Act AFAICT. The reasoning here is that he's now defining the operation and success of the armed forces to be in line in a way that any information conveyed is no longer going to interfere with the armed forces of the United States. Furthermore, redefining the enemy means that he has also made sure that the information does not promote the success of the enemies of the US.
Sorry, that's the funniest thing I've read all week.
An American president with a moral backbone?
Give me a break.
That's like expecting it to rain candyfloss.
The presidency is a hollow man, a figurehead - it's all just a show to make you think you have a democracy. The tail wags the dog, and entrenched non-elected interests run the show, through corruption, lobbying (corruption), and special interests (corruption).
Lost in all the America hate is the fact that the tapping of Google and Yahoo was done by the British. The whole west is complicit but only America gets the hate so it can continue easily.
Britain is equally broken - and as you say, the whole west is complicit, and all, to varying degrees, suffer from the same malaise.