Hacker News Reader

Comment by devx | Hacker News Reader

Impeach him. I'm sorry if you voted for him and you think it's a too "radical" move, but I really think it's actually a very "proportional" and reasonable move at this point.

More think he should be impeached if he goes to war with Syria despite a No vote from Congress and despite UN saying no, and breaking international law. I think the NSA thing is at least as big as that, and if he does both then it's that much clearer that he's acting as a dictator with unlimited powers that needs to be overthrown.

He has no regard for the Constitution, no regard for human rights, no regard for due process, and no regard for international law. Not doing it would just send a message to other psychopaths running for president the next time, that it's okay to blatantly lie to the electorate, and then do stuff at least as bad as he did. Impeach him.

View on HN

Impeachment won't go anywhere, he can hide behind sycophants who would twist the whole endeavor as being racially oriented. Even now that one issue is what keeps many mouths silent, on the NSA, Syria, and other events. Go read some of the stories of some of Hollywood's best known anti-war activist are stymied by this prospect.

No, the way to get the message across is to keep it alive and use in the 2014 elections to ensure his party is trounced. Yes that will mean giving the Republican's the upper hand in Congress but fortunately or unfortunately depending on your political stance they are pretty inept at using it well. There are some Republicans that need to go as well and they should not be given free pass.

It comes down to getting the American people to stay interested enough, to adopt the philosophy of "throw the bums out". If that means we swing back and forth each two years or four then so be it, for when one party has dominance too long we get into situations like we are today.

For what it's worth, younger generations of the Republican party are recognizing civil libertarian viewpoints more and more. With luck, it may in time become the political party it is supposed to be. But I guess that's being pretty optimistic.

I'll need some convincing before I believe there are civil libertarians in either party. Empirically, whoever supports the same party as the President supports greater executive powers while the other party opposes them.

>for when one party has dominance too long we get into situations like we are today.

Yeah, and right now it's the Democrat/Republican party.

You aren't going to change anything switching from Democrat>Republican or vice versa.

It's not the switch from Democrats to Republicans that will make things better. It's the electorate making it clear that the penalty to politicians for violating our civil rights is that they and their party will get thrown out of office.

Unfortunately, I think that for most people, civil rights are very low on the list of issues that they care about when voting in an election. They care much more about health insurance, security of union jobs and pensions, etc. And the big corporate donors probably care about civil rights even less than the average voter.

Obama is not solely responsible for everything that goes on in the US government. The president's power is limited. However, since he is the figurehead of the state, it's only natural that citizens have the impression he is the mastermind behind every single negative action of the gubment.

I'm highly disappointed with Obama but he is hardly a psychopath. All those decisions you find repellent are the result of pressure from third parties or his own underlings. Impeaching Obama would be counter-productive. It would just create instability and would not solve the underlying problems that led him to make those decisions you hate.

Obama is Commander-in-Chief of the DoD, which the NSA operates under.

Literally speaking, the president /is/ the highest commander of the NSA.

Obama is not solely responsible for everything that goes on in the USG, but in this case he bears enough responsibility that he can and should be held accountable.

It doesn't matter where the pressure came from to make Obama go down this road. The bottom line is that Obama chose to go down this road.

Some people are saying, "Well, maybe he wasn't in the loop." If that is the case, and Obama was mislead as to the scope and nature of what the NSA was doing, he should've come down on the NSA HARD. The fact that he got up on TV and stammered on about balancing security and privacy and "welcoming the debate" means he was not alarmed by what was revealed and he had not intention of stopping it. He has done nothing to rein this program in.

Make no mistake, Obama knew enough to know what was going on was wrong. The fact that he chose to go down the wrong path means he is responsible and he should be impeached.

When you're president of the US, you don't get to pass the buck. Sorry, but Obama deserves all the criticism for this.

I would agree. However I think it is more important to impeach those in charge of the intelligence community first and then work up to the President.

I am not sure the President is in the loop here. As far as I can tell he gets most of his info in these areas from the same sources that we do.

The NSA sets itself up as the Fourth branch of government but keeps it a secret even from the original three?

It will not be the first organ of the state to morph into "a state within the state" though it is surprising to see it happening in a liberal democracy.

Or perhaps we were encouraged to look away from the curtain all this time.

> I am not sure the President is in the loop here. As far as I can tell he gets most of his info in these areas from the same sources that we do.

And you're okay with that?

I am not, but given the size of the current federal government I think it is inevitable.

He probably is in the loop, but if he isn't, he sure should be able to get in the loop when he learns about things like this.

I am not sure the President is in the loop here

NSA is the presidents game.

Let's say the President was not in the loop, and all of this stuff was a surprise to him. Why has he not taken any decisive action to fix the problem?

He asked for the resignation of the head of the IRS after the political targeting scandal. He asked for the resignation of General McChrystal after he talked trash about Obama in a Rolling Stone article. But in this brazen assault by the NSA on the very foundations of our government Obama has barely responded at all. Director Clapper flat out lied to Congress and Obama hasn't even lifted a finger.

That to me indicates that Obama is absolutely supportive of what the NSA is doing.

The President definitely doesn't get his information from the same sources we do. He has daily access to top-secret information.

"The President's Daily Brief (PDB) ... is a top-secret document produced each morning for the President of the United States."[1]

And he can definitely read the legal decisions that come out of the FISA court. There's no way that a FISA court decision declaring an NSA program unconstitutional wouldn't get to the President's desk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Daily_Brief

I am aware of this. I was however noting that Obama himself admitted to learning about many of the NSA's programs through the press. It isn't beyond possibility that he had no personal knowledge of court procedings and what was asked of the FISC.

> Not doing it would just send a message to other psychopaths running for president the next time, that it's okay to blatantly lie to the electorate, and then do stuff at least as bad as he did.

Frankly that ship has sailed. Pardoning and rehabilitating Nixon, along with never prosecuting Nixon, Kissinger, Bush, or Cheney for war crimes after they left office has made that message loud and clear.

And it's at all levels. Government is simply above the law. How many police are in prison for murdering civilians?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com