let me try to clarify my feelings about the us gov, obama etc, since folks seem to think i love it/him above all things. first, like all governments, it is in my view not morally legitimate. i take myself not only to assert that, but actually to have proven it, insofar as political claims can be proven. the us government shares that with the assad regime. i also think that it is entwined with a global capitalism that i find repugnant, and that is one of the major oppressive forces in the world, and also that our military - the spending, adventures, weaponry - is fearsomely dangerous: it threatens everybody's life every day.
however, all things being equal, i'd rather have even a distorted democratic system (distorted by corporate money, e.g.) than a straight-up entirely unaccountable totalitarian system. i would rather live in this system than the chinese system, or the soviet system, or the idi amin system, or the pinochet system, etc, and i say there are real differences. admittedly, the responsiveness or responsibility to the people of the american government is a matter of tradition and cultural values rather than any actual safety we have if obama or someone decided to go totalitarian and the military acquiesced. we've had our scrapes: you might consult cheney's memoir. we need constant vigilance.
in the last decade, the us government has done many many bad things. the iraq invasion/occupation killed many people for no immediate reason (certainly not for the reasons the bush admin gave), though it also deposed a classic despot. we have tortured people, and i'd say we don't know the full extent of what has happened and what is happening. that is why free speech and press rights are so incredibly important. that's why, for example, i regard bradley manning as a hero and a political prisoner, and decry his mistreatment. i do not regard it as equivalent to khamis gaddafi stacking political prisoners in a warehouse, then throwing in grenades and firebombs, then setting up a crossfire on those who emerge, and then heaping their bodies in maggot-infested holes.
but we do have an incredibly wide-ranging free press, though it is also distorted by corporate domination. but it is less corporate-dominated than it was thirty years ago: many more outlets, and anyone can blog anything or tweat etc. even the wikileaks stuff got published, is available, even if the cia is also hacking it.
obviously, there are worse and better applications of coercive force. that the police have sometimes raped people is no argument that it is wrong given the actual immediate circumstances for that particular policeman to prevent that particular rape. indeed, anyone who is in a position to prevent a rape is morally required to do so. i don't think there is any way to make our engagement with the arab spring into a simple act of oppression, and indeed we acted sluggishly because of the many connections of our military and our corporations to middle eastern despots, kleptocrats, and torturers. that was disgusting. but if we condemn that, we ought to congratulate the us state when it finally turns on them. i actually do think that nato ordered airstrikes to save the people of benghazi, and that nato helped the people of libya remove a monster of oppression.
for that matter, i'm very not down with religious fanatics flying jetliners into buildings or suicide bombers on the bus, and few people have ever deserved death more clearly than osama and his cohorts.
anyone who opposes torturing people, robbing people, raping people, shutting them up and shutting them in, ought to want the same for assad. or if you're not feeling bloodthirsty, then an immediate comfortable retirement in a place he can do no more harm.
i think obama is better than bush, and that he's actually trying to wind down our wars. now that's not to say i love him and day to day my politics might be closer to the tea party than the obama admin, at least on sizeofgov or deficit-spending-type issues. so anyway, let me be me, and try not to operate on a worldview with no room for any nuance, or that basically responds to an a priori position that anything the us gov does is bad. rather, try as best you can to gather up the most reliable info you can on any given situation (which is difficult, i know, and all media outlets need to be approached critically) and analyze it on its own.
