The other one, well, whatever their deficiencies, not most of those things.
This is the sort of silliness ('they're all exactly the same!') that, with the help of the Naderites actually helped put a Bush administration in power.
From what I can see, Obama has not given Americans back one single freedom that Bush removed, in fact he has expanded and built on them.
Or, just imagine if that Bush monkey had been able to do the Hollywood USA, USA, USA murder of Bin Laden, sitting there sniggering (Insert Jon Stewart impression) like a nut job while the operation was executed, like Obama petty much did. (Lets be honest, Obama could hardly contain himself.) The left and rest of the planet would have gone mental.
Don't get me wrong, I do exaggerate to show the point, but we in the UK experienced something like this and you could see it coming a mile off. When Blair (remember the British gimp Bush had in tow?) came to power it was after Thatcher and the limp replacement, John Major (forgotten him? Most have). People were over the moon and expected much. With in 3 days it was pretty clear that we had just replaced one terrible regime with one while was moulded in its image, and just build on the questionable things the previous government did, and reversed nothing what so ever.
This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics and I saw the exact same tragedy unfold with Obama. Its a real shame, and damning indictment of western politics. Frankly the whole thing is a sad tragedy.
That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive.
And my point is, very specifically, not that 'if you have misgivings about one side or administration, you ought to have none about another'. It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone? - it's a decidedly unfalsifiable position to begin with.
I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).
Perhaps you're not familiar with the way campaign funding works. In short, the parties band together to increase funding that, while really only good for making it easier to get elected, and is therefore somewhat self-perpetuating (e.g., I need money to win, to get more money, to win, etc.) - it is still money, and people covet it.
Why can't he have worthwhile things to say about politics even if he's given up on voting? Actually, I suspect he'll have even better ideas now.
> It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone?
Tell me, what exactly was the distinction between voting for Obama over Romney? How would life be different now, had Romney won? Would it be better? Worse? Would Romney have done something to actually help with the economy, unlike Obama?
What about jobs then? Would Romney have "created" jobs better than Obama (as if jobs could be created by central planning anyway)?
Lumping Obama and Romney together as roughly equivalent is exactly what someone who sees things for what they are would do.
There's no shortage of perfectly defensible complaints one can have with this or any other administration without having to resort to tinfoil hat ones.
There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before.
Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues.
But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times.
Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.