For a High-Tech President, a Hard-Fought E-Victory
For more than two months, Mr. Obama has been waging a vigorous battle with his handlers to keep his BlackBerry, which like millions of other Americans he has relied upon for years to stay connected with friends and advisers. (And, of course, to get Chicago White Sox scores.)
He won the fight, aides disclosed Thursday, but the privilege of becoming the nation’s first e-mailing president comes with a specific set of rules.
“The president has a BlackBerry through a compromise that allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends,” said Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, “in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate.”
[...]
The presidency, for all the power afforded by the office, has been deprived of the tools of modern communication. George W. Bush famously sent a farewell e-mail address to his friends when he took office eight years ago.
While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president - and those corresponding with him - agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.
Because there was a difference in conduct. Obama consulted "lawyers and the Secret Service," "agreed to strict rules" and "use[d] a specially made device...approved by national security officials." Hegseth yelled YOLO before effectively tweeting target co-ordinates for our warbirds.
Yeah, but that bit about "handlers" of the President of the United States could also be a data point here. That term is usually used in conjunction with 'asset'.
The President is supposed to be "an asset". An asset of the USA. They are subservient to an institution, despite being granted certain powers and authority.
Nixon once said "If the President does it, it's not illegal", despite that being just nowhere to be found in the Constitution in any form, yet that statement caused a bunch of right wing think tanks and policy institutions and voters to agree so wholeheartedly that they spent 70 years ensuring it would become reality.
Significant portions of the Republican party have been trying to make the US a monarchy again for decades.
When you feel real love for your favorite celebrity convict, whose incompetence is beyond denying, you'll put your mind to work to search for any device that will enable you to excuse anything he does and who he nominates.
People will talk about "politicians being incompetent", or act like actually anyone who has ever been in the office was like this. It's a pretty close and comforting way to deal with the reality of supporting a fraud without having to admit that you were duped.
"A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed, faulty, or false reasoning"
What is the faulty reasoning here? Apart from "My side good, your side bad."
You can find incompetence in previous cabinet officials. This batch of cabinet officials has far more people who are far more incompetent and unqualified than any previous cabinet.
The faulty reasoning is saying that "this is just like previous administrations". It's not.
But the previous president was in the advanced stages of alzheimers and struggled to form coherent sentences. I think he alone beats anyone in the current organisation.
As opposed to the current guy, who hasn’t completed a sentence or a thought in twenty years and regularly goes off on tangents about black people eating pets. Great take. Love when you folks make it clear you’re just here to shitpost dishonestly.
Nor can the current guy remember things for more than the day and the then he admitted it live on tv after taking a dementia test!
Perhaps one of the more depressingly funny thing to learn is that in the first Trump term people would just steal papers and etc from Trump because by the end of the day he'd forget about something if there wasn't a sheet in front of him. And this would keep him from doing something crazy.
Maybe you're going to find out how much more immoral warlordism is. "Not having a government at all" is a weird fantasy of teenagers.
(the really odd combo is people who hold both the "government is immoral, especially the US federal government" and the "the US federal government should go to war with China" combo, which a few moments thought will show the contradiction)
Let's imagine we do go to warlordism and I do get to see how immoral it is.
At least I won't have to pretend that the coercion and theft is actually moral and good, right? At least I won't have to doublethink myself, turn myself inside out to justify the unjustifiable.
Ackonwledging the problem (immoral government) is just the first, esxential step towards making an actual difference. Why continue to pour in more effort to support an already failed system?
> I won't have to pretend that the coercion and theft is actually moral and good, right?
Of course you will. Not praising the warlord as moral and good will result in real physical consequences for disloyalty, maybe even summary death. As opposed to saying the same thing on HN when just your position is attacked.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
"Some of the classified emails found on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s home server were even more sensitive than top secret, according to an inspector general for the intelligence community."
