Breaking Bad: America Has Used Walter White Logic Since 9/11

This guy spells out the stuff that so many Americans don't seem to have understood even yet.

Breaking Bad: America Has Used Walter White Logic Since 9/11

Why is Conor Friedersdorf living in 2006?

richard09 wrote:

This guy spells out the stuff that so many Americans don't seem to have understood even yet.

Right you are, Richard. And a great many of them will never understand it.
I love the analogy he made with Breaking bad. Dead on.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Why is Conor Friedersdorf living in 2006?

Uh...because his house would be worth an additional $400,000?
What do you mean?

_Howard wrote:

What do you mean?

I mean most of what he complains about went out with Dick Cheney (who truly was an evil fuck.)

NoCoPilot wrote:

_Howard wrote:

What do you mean?

I mean most of what he complains about went out with Dick Cheney (who truly was an evil fuck.)

If you really believe that, it's time you woke up.

richard09 wrote:

If you really believe that, it's time you woke up.

Let me turn this around on you.  Give me a link that proves anything in this article is still happening  -- aside from the drones and the surveillance, which I'll give you up front.  And the few remaining at Gitmo, who are mostly so radicalized they can't be returned to the wild.

Wikipedia wrote:

As of August 2013, 164 detainees remain at Guantanamo.[9] As of December 2008, around 50-60 detainees have been cleared for release, but have not been released due to "difficulties" in "repatriating" them.[10] The unrepatriated include ethnic Uyghurs, who were training to fight for independence from the Chinese government in Xinjiang province. Chinese authorities want to take action against them

The article was not a snapshot of today, but a recounting of events that led us to where we are today. Note that the author uses the past tense quite often.

Yea-huh. Okay, my bad, I thought the author was trying to make a point.

I think you made my point quite thoroughly.

richard09 wrote:

I think you made my point quite thoroughly.

Then you uh, need to wake up?

What I took from the article was the concept that, when confronted with disastrous situations, people are willing to dispense with the moral values they have held in pursuit of a resolution of the problem. That's what Walter White did, and that's what a great many of the American people did as well.

No, that's what Dick Cheney did.  Not everybody agreed with him.  A lot of his excesses have been pulled back in the intervening five years, but some were structural and some were deemed useful in counterterrorism.  Some, like TSA secuity measures, persist despite all logic.

If I were Jeh Johnson, coming into the Homeland Security job, one of the FIRST things I'd do is go through all of these jackass regulations and kick out all the ones that were Cheney's imperial over-reaching, keep the few that actually related to security, and remake Homeland Security into a division that uses brains instead of brawn to defeat terrorists.

Quote :

Mr. Johnson — whose first name is pronounced “Jay” — has little experience with some of the issues that Ms. Napolitano faced, like border security and immigration. But he was a legal adviser to Mr. Obama during his first presidential campaign and has similar views to the president’s about the future of the United States’ counterterrorism operations. He was at the center of Mr. Obama’s first-term efforts to re-evaluate the counterterrorism policies of President George W. Bush. Source

I think you've got this backwards, NoCo. Dick Cheney is one of the few that did NOT dispense with his high moral standards, because he had none to begin with. But a great many of the American people agreed with the Bush/Cheney policies, and many still do. They are still scared shitless of the Muslim in the closet.

Yes, some of the excesses have been done away with (and some just hidden better). The damn Homeland Security department should just be closed. One-hundred percent of it. TSA can be moved to Transportation, where it belongs. The few other valuable functions of HS can be moved to the appropriate agencies; they aren't doing anything new, they're just doing more of it (and badly).

Even the stuff that the Obama administration has got sort of right it has done half-assed. And some stuff is worse. Journalism in the US was already pitiful, before the war on whistle-blowers.

Clemency for Torturers, but Not for Edward Snowden

richard09 wrote:

Clemency for Torturers, but Not for Edward Snowden

Which demonstrates once again that the consequences for breaking the law are dependent on who benefits from the action.