Essay:Detailed response to Secret Squirrel

Because the section in the talk page is ultimately irrelevant to the edit discussion, I will keep this to an essay. Nonetheless, this will be addressed directly to him, as if I was directly responding to him on the talk page.

Response to claims

The Obama administration revived the government's prosecution of Thomas Drake after the Bush administration dropped it.

• One case. As I don't have full knowledge of this incident, I will for now give this to you.

Obama personally campaigned for the extension of the Patriot Act.

• You forget that he increased oversight of it, and the fact that more people support it during his presidency than during that of Bush. Interestingly, you admit that this was not a "broken promise", but something he never tried to hide his position on.

When Bush left office there were no full body scanners in airports, now there are.

• Obama does not have direct control over the TSA.

Bradley Manning is sitting in jail and Julian Assange is still facing prosecution.

• Manning is not a whistleblower. Dumping 700,000 military documents online is illegal, just as Scooter Libby's leak of Valerie Plume's name.

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for no legitimate reason, just a few days after escalating the Afghanistan war.

• Not even a clear criticism. Afghanistan war is irrelevant to civil liberties.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with this creep. I'm going to stand by my view that the last if not the only decent Democrats to ever win the preisdential nomination were McGovern, Carter, and Dukakis; the only real progressive choice in 1996 and 2000 was Ralph Nader;

• If Nader was progressive he would have actually tried to get progress done. How do you define a "real progressive"? Gore certainly was a far better choice than Bush, to say otherwise is just retarded. Instead of trying to get the Democratic Party more progressive by working to build a more progressive electorate (without which you will not get any progress whatsoever), his actions resulted in the more conservative candidate winning.

Ron Paul - although I do not by any means support him - is a legitimate protest vote in the current environment - and Obama should be sharing a cell with Bush and Cheney.

• Paul is not a "legitimate protest vote". If you consider him legitimate, David Duke is equivilant. Their political views are very similar. By your logic Wallace and Thurmond were also "legitimate protest votes".

Further comments

Obama is not a perfect President. I have criticized him for many actions, such as the extension of the Patriot Act. However, I have acknowledged that there are valid political reasons for this; most people supported the Patriot Act in 2011 and it would have been political suicide for him to have not extended it.

In other areas, it is remarkable how much he has fought for civil liberties. Almost immediately into office, he signed executive orders banning torture and closing down CIA prisons. He has tried to close down Gitmo, despite 90% of the Senate (including Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders) opposing him. Even then, he has made military trials much fairer. When the NDAA came up, he threatened to veto the bill until specific language was introduced to ban indefinite detention of US citizens. Even then, he made it clear in his signing statement that he had objections to indefinite detention being placed in a bill like that at all, regardless of who is covered. His objections to SOPA and PIPA ensured their demise, and he has threatened to veto CISPA. These advancements cannot be ignored.

Many might criticize him for boosting the Afghanistan War and his drone strikes. However, I'd say it would be better to take out Al-Qaida completely now, rather than pulling out and waiting for them to grow in power so that they can attack again and create new wars. International opinion of the US has improved during his Presidency, making it feasable for us to withdraw from Afghanistan responsibly.

To call Obama a war criminal is furthermore ridiculous. Whatever failures he has made in foreign policy, you can't compare them to the actions made by Roosevelt and Lincoln during their wars, or the blatent censorship of free speech that occured under Truman and Eisenhower. Mr. Anon (talk) 03:37, 19 May 2012 (UTC)