Progressive Buttons Blog

The last time I wrote here, it was still almost 2 months before the 2008 presidential election. I didn’t think it was that long. Goodness, how things have changed since then.

Back then, I was worried primarily about what could happen if John McCain and Sarah Palin won the election. That would have been frightening.

Barack Obama won, but now, another kind of frightening thing has taken place here in America: President Obama has turned out to be, in many respects, what I feared a Republican President might be.

On many issues, Obama is now supporting the same rotten policies of George W. Bush that he promised last year to reverse. One of those issues: torture.

As President, Barack Obama has acted to cover up evidence of torture. Obama has repeated George W. Bush’s declaration that, as President, he has the right to to stop any lawsuit merely by asserting, without providing any evidence, that “state secrets” are involved. He has used this unconstitutional power to deny people who have been tortured by the U.S. government the right to receive justice in a court of law.

Is this the change Americans thought they were voting for? How does this count as the politics of hope? It looks a lot like the same old politics of fear to me.

Yet, there’s a great deal of silence on these kinds of issues. Republicans are silent on torture because their man, George W. Bush, supported it. And now, Democrats are silent on torture because their man, Barack Obama, is enabling it. In opinion polls, large numbers of Americans now say they support the use of torture.

I’ve created this button to help fight the tide. Wear it to make the simple statement that’s increasingly rare: I’m one of those Americans who still believes that torture is wrong.