A Brief Vomiting Of Hate Upon The NDAA

There are days where I don’t want to vomit rage all over you.  Today isn’t one of those days.  But I think it would be hypocritical of me to let the day pass without mentioning the passing, and subsequent failing to veto of, the National Defense Authorization act.
Fucking leprous shit-eating motherfucker.
Obama’s record on personal liberty has been pretty abysmal – I mean, I still blame Bush for starting the Guantanamo detention camps, but Obama’s kept them going.  And at this point, what I’m seeing as Obama’s legacy is two things:
1)  A complicated boondoggle to fund the insurance companies that he shoved through Congress without actually explaining to anybody, which may or may not work and which may or may not be dismantled in the courts;
2)  Destroying habeas corpus.
Basically, by not vetoing the bill, Obama’s said, “You know what?  If I think you’re guilty of something, I can jail you for as long as I want.  Do I need evidence?  Nah.  A trial?  Nah.  If you fucking annoy me, I can fucking get rid of you.”
Which, as has been noted here, is not really a surprise – the NDAA merely codifies what Obama and Bush have been doing all along, a great big ol’ reacharound Presidential land grab of authority.  And you know, maybe I do trust Obama not to lock up civil enemies without warning, barely, but this isn’t about just Obama.  This is about every fucking President from now on being able to do this.  This is handing a loaded gun to every dickwad wanna-be tyrant who walks into office.
And Obama knows this.
As I’ve said time and time again, the problem with just side-stepping the law is twofold: one, if the laws aren’t sufficient to catch criminals, reform the fucking laws.  Without laws, you have abuse.  And while it’s tempting to just tell the cops, “Yeah, it’s hard to play by the rules, so we’ll look away while you go beat up the guilty,” in reality what happens is the cops pick on whoever they don’t like instead of actually carrying out justice.  If the current tools aren’t good enough, refashion the fucking tools, you leaking diarrhetic fuckfaces.
Two, as Irving Berlin once said, “Anything you can do, I can do better,” which is to say that every time the United States says, “Hey, we don’t need to actually follow rules or encourage freedom locally,” some shit-pot of a tyrannical dictatorship looks to us and goes, “Well, if the country of freedom can’t be bothered, we certainly don’t need to be.”
If America’s going to advertise itself as “The land of the free,” then it needs to be an example of what freedom is to other fucking countries.  And freedom is not full of shortcuts.  Freedom’s a hard thing where sometimes the terrorists are smarter than your laws, and sometimes you know someone’s guilty, but you let them free because it’s not about your gut feeling, it’s about proving it to other people with evidence.  Because the alternative is just fucking grabbing whoever looks guilty, and feeding into that feeling that the system is rigged, which eventually leads to a never-ending series of overthrows as people come to realize that if they’re not the guy on top, they’re going to be fucked over.
Obama’s a scholar.  He knows that.  He’s studied what happens, and still he threw it away in a cynical, personal power grab.  So fuck him and fuck his idea of freedom.