It Takes Jon Stewart To Finally Ask Obama About Civil Liberties… But Lets Him Off The Hook On Bogus Answer

Failures

from the sad dept

In the various Presidential debates, no one seems to want to bring up President Obama’s near complete about-face on his promises concerning civil liberties. It’s so ridiculous that the Democratic party simply removed the issue from their platform — and that’s because he hasn’t just continued former President Bush’s abuses of civil liberties, he’s gone even further with them. And no one seems to want to ask the candidates about it… except a comedian. When President Obama appeared on The Daily Show recently, Jon Stewart actually asked him about this:

STEWART: I think people have been surprised to see the strength of the Bush era warrantless wiretapping laws and those types of things not also be lessened—That the structures he put in place that people might have thought were government overreach and maybe they had a mind you would tone down, you haven’t.

OBAMA: The truth is we have modified them and built a legal structure and safeguards in place that weren’t there before on a whole range issues.

However, as the EFF explains in great detail, President Obama’s answer is simply not true. It’s not even close to true.

To the contrary, there’s no indication that the still-active warrantless wiretapping program—which includes a warrantless dragnet on millions of innocent Americans’ communications—has significantly changed from the day Obama took office. With regard to the FISA Amendments Act, the Obama Administration has actively opposed all proposed safeguards in Congress. All the while, his Administration has been even more aggressive than President Bush in trying to prevent warrantless wiretapping victims from having their day in court and has continued building the massive national security infrastructure needed to support it. 

They then go on to look more closely at all of these different promises from President Obama related to this, all of which he’s fallen down on. Unfortunately, Stewart doesn’t push back on this point, as they then go straight to a joke, before moving on to another topic. Of course, for those of us who aren’t shackled to a party and, instead, find civil liberties to be a key issue, we’re left with two major candidates who don’t seem to care about massive abuses by the federal government.

Filed Under: barack obama, civil liberties, jon stewart, warrantless wiretapping