How can a conservative Chris Christie and a very liberal Cory Booker both be comfortably cruising to victory by a large margin in the same electorate in New Jersey? Does this show the power of charisma and that the public largely doesn’t care about policy as much as leaders that they trust and feel are accountable? Or does this simply show the power of independents who break largely for Christie and Booker?
Category: Short Form
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Limited government
“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” he said in a speech then. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.”
-President Obama in 2007
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Limited government
If the executive branch is so vast that President Obama can’t be expected to know about all of these scandals, there’s an even bigger issue at stake here. The government is too big to be managed by the systems that we have in place. This transcends institutional incompetence and gets into a grand old American battle about the size of government, and in the wake of all of these scandals, it seems that big government’s advocates are the best case against it.
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So the PATRIOT Act still sucks
Funny, last time I checked, liberals didn’t like the PATRIOT Act. Don’t we have the right to privacy? The Obama Administration apparently doesn’t agree. This is a great example of how once powers are given to the government, they are never relinquished, as even those who vehemently opposed the PATRIOT Act are now using its most controversial provisions.
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Government should be on the record
This is awesome. The government, as a public agency, should rarely be hiding things from the public. There is a place for secrecy. There is sensitive information that the public should not know. That said, for literally 99% of government dealings, they shouldn’t need to go off the record. News outlets keep government accountable, as even President Obama recently said. There’s no place for off the record meetings when addressing a scandal that involves suppressing the press. Good on you New York Times.
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Scandals
If Teapot Dome destroyed Harding’s presidency’s reputation, and Watergate actually ended Nixon’s presidency, the IRS, media and Benghazi scandals almost make certain that Obama’s presidency will go down in history as a total disaster.
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Always the last to know
Seems like our president is never really informed about what his administration is doing. Between the IRS scandal, Benghazi and the media surveillance, he claims that he was either informed late, didn’t have a say in the decision making process, or best yet, found out from the same news sources we did. Either he’s lying, which would suck, or government is simply too big. Shouldn’t government be small enough so that the head of the executive branch knows what it’s doing?
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Fun Fact:
Both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush could be in jail for their past drug usage, had they gotten caught. I wonder what other potential-filled, otherwise law-abiding citizens drug prohibition is preventing from contributing to society?
Salutary Neglect 