White House Fool Report: Which side are you on?

Playing Guantanamera. Image from Gocce di Note.

At LGM, Loomis took note of the ghastly report by Eric Lipton in yesterday's Times on Republican state attorneys general under the leadership of Oklahoma's Scott Pruitt acting directly at the bidding of energy industry puppet masters to fight against Obama administration regulations. Just as ALEC writes right-to-work and anti-environment bills for state legislatures, so do energy company lawyers draft letters to go to the EPA over an attorney general's signature demanding revisions of rules they don't like or recalculation of evidence that makes them look bad. Both AGs and legislators openly selling themselves to powerful interests that value profit over clean air and safe water.

And it's not just that; the AGs have their own officially constituted gang! The so-called "Rule of Law" campaign,

in which attorneys general band together to operate like a large national law firm, has been used to back lawsuits and other challenges against the Obama administration on environmental issues, the Affordable Care Act and securities regulation. The most recent target is the president’s executive action on immigration.

Or, in short, to thwart the federal government in the name and under the pay (campaign contributions) of the most criminally abusive industries, Big Energy, Big Pharma and for-profit medical care, Big Banks, and Big Agribiz (which prefers the status quo of an uncontrolled flow of illegal immigrants to a regularized status allowing immigrants to demand a fair wage), on the issues most of us care most about.

Whether you compare it like Loomis to a new Gilded Age or like BooMan to "an episode of Deadwood", it's another clear case of our real constitutional crisis, as opposed to the fake one in the newspapers, which is the combination of increasing corruption at the more local levels combined with increasing ability to thwart the federal level, a nullificationism backed by the nation's most powerful business interests.

Obama's executive actions are the most effective things we have, just about, to correct this, and if you are on the side of the environment, the medical patient and banking customer, and the immigrant, you have to be on his side as well. I'm sorry John Yoo and Jamie Dimon aren't in jail (can somebody please remind me how all the other presidents did at jailing criminal bankers and torture supporters, by the way, because I can't seem to find much information on that), but I'd be a lot sorrier if the Dodd-Frank reform hadn't passed and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau didn't exist and torture were still apparently legal.

And here comes another executive action of possibly dubious constitutionality! On Black Friday, when the president was shopping at the Politics & Prose store, another customer twitted him:

"Hope you can close Guantanamo," said one patron, referring to the president’s efforts to close the U.S. detention center in Cuba, which was opened in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.

"We're working on it," Obama replied, then jokingly added to the nearby crowd of shoppers: "Any other issues?"

Little did we imagine that a week later there was going to be some positive news on that front—or, as Greenwald puts it in The Intercept (which has a new Editor-in-Chief, mazeltov!)

RELEASE OF SIX DETAINEES AFTER TWELVE YEARS HIGHLIGHTS THE HISTORIC EVIL OF GUANTÁNAMO

with a picture letting you know who the historic evil is embodied by

and a graf pushing the message just in case you missed it:

As the great Miami Herald Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg notes, there are – six years after Obama was elected on a pledge to close the camp – still 136 detainees there, with 67 of them cleared for release (Democrats’ claims that Obama is largely blameless are false and misleading in the extreme, as are claims that no country will accept detainees). In a just-posted article, Rosenberg notes that the release of these six men, all in their 30s and 40s, was underway for a full year, but it “sat on [Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's] desk for months, awaiting his signature, while intelligence analysts evaluated it.”

Yes, the news out of Guantánamo turns out to be its additional proof of Obama's wicked treachery, against (unlinked) claims of Democrats that are not merely false but also misleading, and not merely misleading but extremely so, and not in isolation but in association with at least one other false, misleading, and extremely misleading claim, all as laid out via links to four, count 'em, four distinct opinion pieces by Mr. Glenn Greenwald, though he sets it up to make it appear as if it's all facts and he got them from Rosenberg, whose piece does not in fact blame Obama at all, though it does blame Hagel, noting as well that Obama had to go over Hagel's head to release five earlier prisoners:

While some quarters of the U.S. government were pleased with the deal, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was slow to approve it.... Before he signed it, the White House ordered the truly clandestine transfer of five Taliban prisoners to Qatar in a trade for POW Bowe Bergdahl on May 31 — drawing protest on Capitol Hill that Congress had not been informed in advance.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article4322270.html#storylink=cpy

Hagel was earning his firing there too, stonewalling on this issue which he knew was of particular importance to the president (sorry, Tom Engelhardt, the War Party does not regard Hagel's sacking as a victory, though I suppose McCain is glad to see his old friend able to join the Stupid Shit Caucus publicly at last).

I don't suppose I would say Obama is "largely blameless", to use Greenwald's made-up phrase; I'm sure he could have handled it better. But I would say he never wavered once in intending to close Guantánamo, and the implication that he must have been lying all this time ("Bwahahaha, I won the election with my fake promise to close Gitmo so the deluded hippie majority would vote for me, the fools!") is beyond idiotic.

And what has happened now is yet another case of Obama using executive order to keep one of the promises he was elected on, against the bought-and-sold conservative forces trying to stop him (not to mention in this case virtually the whole establishment of incurious Washington journalists, fearful congresspersons, and his own secretaries of defense). Whose side are you on? I'm really not even kidding about this.