krebscycle

This may be the worst time in American history to be a person of conscience employed in the machinery of government. –Truthdig 2013

Perhaps when President Wilson was segregating the civil service and forcing out black employees a person of conscience might have been a little bothered. Maybe when the US government was rounding up Japanese-Americans and imprisoning them while their neighbors stole their property or enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act for that matter, there may have been a slight twinge. It’s not impossible that when Andrew Jackson was slaughtering the Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee nations and forcing them out on the Trail of Tears, some oversensitive types in the government might have wrestled with their consciences for a few seconds. One might imagine that the state department contained one or two employees of delicate sensibility who were upset by  our client torture state in Argentina, the Contras, the  destruction of Indochina,  or mass bombardment of civilian neighborhoods in Iraq and torture. I don’t know, but apparently they had less cause for moral anguish than those working under the first African-American President. After all -get this –

Our decade sees the president select and order the death of people in other countries with impunity

Knock me over with a straw! The President of the United States – selecting and ordering the deaths of people in other countries! What a world, what a world!  I thought America was the Pacifist Empire. And then:

The Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined

Let’s not even discuss the apparently lost distinction between whistle blower and leaker but go to the number of such prosecutions – 6, that’s SIX. Six prosecutions some of which have resulted in sentences ranging from a misdemeanor plea by Thomas Drake to 30 months for the CIA agent who gave the names and home numbers of covert operatives to the press.  And in secret courts – oh wait, in standard courts with regular judges and the option of jury trials.  Wow, almost enough to declare – oh wait more than enough –

Writing in The Guardian on June 10, Ellsberg said that Snowden had given us the most “important leak” in “American history” and “the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution.” Referring to the secret police of East Germany, he wrote that Snowden had revealed “that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America,” a symptom of America’s plummet into a dangerous “abyss” of totalitarianism.

Just like Stasi! We’re doomed. The black guy did it.  We want our country back. We’re not racists, though. We are reality based!