When did Democrats stop protecting whistle blowers? During the Nixon and Bush years, the Democrats were champions of transparency in government. Daniel Ellsberg, who illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers, was hailed as a hero. When Obama was running for president he praised reported incidents of whistle blowing as, “acts of courage and patriotism”, which “should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration”.
Now fast forward. In this article Glenn Greenwald paints a different picture.
“More remarkable is that a Democratic presidential candidate is sticking his chest out and proudly touting that he has tried to imprison more whistle blowers on espionage charges than all previous presidents in history combined: more than the secrecy-loving Bush/Cheney White House, more than the paranoid, leak-hating Nixon administration, more than anyone in American history.” -Glenn Greenwald
When we focus too much on the heroes and villains of our national political scene, we can miss the big picture. The United States is now a vast military empire that must destroy any serious threat to its hegemony. To keep our current level of consumption we must turn other parts of the world into a living hell. That is an ugly truth few Americans want to face. So whether it be the dirty military secrets revealed by Bradley Manning, or the corrupt financial ties released by Wiki leaks, we Americans have chosen to shoot the messenger rather than face the message.
Whichever candidate we choose in November will still have a job description that demands lying to us about what we are doing in other parts of the world, and in crushing any who would tell us the truth. What we have become as a nation is the most classified secret of them all.