Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by n1 on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-and-no-means-no dept.

A campaign to pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched in combination with a fawning Oliver Stone film about him, hasn't made any headway. The request spurred the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and 9 Democrats, to send a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. "He is a criminal," they stated flatly.

Obama weighed in on the matter on Friday. During his European tour, he was interviewed by Der Spiegel—the largest newspaper in Germany, a country where Snowden is particularly popular. After discussing a wide range of issues, he was asked: Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden?

Obama replied: "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves, so that's not something that I would comment on at this point."

Will the NSA's spying and Snowden's actions come to define Obama's legacy?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:02AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:02AM (#431070) Journal

    Let us not forget that Gore ran as more hawkish than GWB, picked that mother fucking asshole neocon Lieberman as his running mate, and was a total corporatist tool. Sure, he did a lot of work to rehab his image in the 00s, but you never know, he may have been even more of a warmonger than GWB ("make no mistake" (*) GWB was another mother fucking asshole).

    (*) I never really heard that phrase before GWB and I absolutely detest it.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:31AM (#431079)

    Yeah, I sat that election out (the libertarian candidate wasn't any great shakes and Nader was meh).

    But the absolute worst aspect of Gore? Tipper!

    No way in hell would I tolerate her turning the White House into a sorority.

    The only good thing she did was get Zappa to testify before the senate.

  • (Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:12PM

    by Hawkwind (3531) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:12PM (#431339)
    Gore, remember the fundy mess his wife tried to make back in the 80's? For fans of the old Bloom County here's a reminder: http://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2012/06/11 [gocomics.com].
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:57PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:57PM (#431366)

    The 2000 election, plus the 2008 election, should have taught Democrats a hard lesson about how not to run elections, and what does and doesn't work in getting Democrats elected to the White House (and also down-ticket races).

    In 2000, as you point out, Gore was a corporatist tool, hawkish, and picked an asshole neocon for running mate. He also had a bitch of a wife who wanted to censor music. He also ran on an anti-gun platform. And he had a strong 3rd-party challenger (Nader). On top of all that, Gore simply wasn't well-liked or charismatic. Gore lost. It was close, he even won the popular vote, but he lost the election.

    In 2008, Obama out-maneuvered Hillary in the primary and won there. He was extremely popular with young voters, and got them to actually show up to vote. He was charismatic, and gave great speeches. He promised government transparency, and wasn't obviously a corporatist tool. He wasn't a warmonger. Now of course, in hindsight not all this stuff was quite true, but this was the perception during the race. What happened? Obama won, and by a healthy margin too. And Democrats did well in general in that election, probably thanks to all the younger voters ticking (D) boxes after voting for Obama.

    So now, in 2016, what does the DNC do? They sabotage the campaign of the guy who's popular with young voters, and try to force a candidate down our throats who's a warmonger, a corporatist tool, is not charismatic or well-liked, has a huge trail of scandals, and who picks a shitty center-right establishment and religious running mate, and what happens? She loses, just like in 2000. And she loses to probably the second most unpopular candidate ever to run for president (her being the first). And with her loss came a crushing defeat for Democrats across the board too. So the big question is: what the fuck was the DNC thinking? Was it being run by people too young to remember the 2000 and 2008 elections? They weren't that long ago.

    • (Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday November 22 2016, @10:58PM

      by arslan (3462) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @10:58PM (#431547)

      Maybe they knew things the public didn't.

      <Conspiracy theory>
      Like when it was Obama vs. Hillary, they new they can get Obama to toe the line so went with the candidate with the best chance of winning, but not so with Bernie.
      </Conspiracy theory>

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:14PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:14PM (#431884)

        Sounds like a nice conspiracy theory, but I seriously doubt it's true; Hillary is obviously the candidate who'll toe the corporatist line the best.

        More likely, they knew (and we didn't) that Obama would toe the line well enough for their purposes, and he was really popular, so they simply didn't do anything to interfere. Bernie was a different story, so they pulled out all the stops to keep him from winning.