WASHINGTON, D.C. — In Februrary of 2013, President Barack Obama proclaimed his administration “the most transparent” in the history of the Executive Branch. New details involving the CIA’s spying on the Senate — something that many would consider to be an unconstitutional breach of the separation of powers between the Legislative and Executive branches of the U.S. government — seem to back up that assertion, in the minds of Obama acolytes.
As it turns out, the Senate’s investigation into the CIA’s spying has alerted the public to the fact that CIA-director John Brennan consulted with Obama’s team (details are not clear as to whether the president himself was briefed). Some would argue that this means the White House is anything but transparent, since the reported facts so far don’t show the White House alerting the Senate to CIA’s plans to snoop into hard drives that were supposed to be logically walled-off from the country’s premier intelligence gathering and extrajudicial drone killing agency’s prying eyes. Obama supporters however, so far don’t seem to worried about what appears to be on the outside a very egregious and flagrant flouting of the constitutional firewall put up between the three branches of government.
“Hey man, Bush did some bad stuff too,” said 54-year-old resident of Calamity Falls, PA, Susan Garish. “Why doesn’t the buck stop there, in that administration? What, just because Bush hadn’t been in office for a couple years and this story has nothing to do with him, we’re not supposed to give Obama a pass?” Other Democratic voters had a slightly different take.
“Sure, I’m pissed off that Obama’s not been the transparent president he said he’d be,” said Phillip Tolbertson of Grand City, CA. “But we’re sure Hillary Clinton will never disappoint us by compromising her professed principles. She’s different. Sure she’s a politician. But she’s different,” Tolbertson insisted.
When asked how they’d feel if Bush had been found to be hiding the fact that the CIA was going to spy on them from the Senate, most Obama supporters we talked to agreed he should be at the very minimum drawn and quartered. “It’s just different when Republicans act like they are above the law than when Democrats do it,” said Tyler McShane of Forced Habits, IA. “You can call us intellectually dishonest if you’d like, but as long as its a duplicitous politician with the right capital letter next to his or her name, we can trust them to continually vacuum up power into the Executive branch. Because it’s not like a Republican president would just use that precedent to keep the power like Obama did. Obama plays sixty-two level chess while Republicans are playing Capture the Flag.”
