MORE AND MORE AMERICANS NOW QUESTION HOW OBAMA IS DEALING WITH HEALTHCARE REFORM, PERSONAL PRIVACY AND OTHER KEY ISSUES.

by Nat Hentoff
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – JANUARY 2010

As Barack Obama approached his second year in the White House, the jubilant campaign shouts of “Change we can believe in!” and “Yes, we can!” were hardly ever heard during his public appearances across the nation. In August 2009, as the President was in New Hampshire defending his incendiary healthcare reforms, a protester shouted, “Keep your change, and I’ll keep my freedom!” Other demonstrators carried signs that, quoting James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, decried the government’s overreaching into personal liberties.

And in Pennsylvania, where newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter was a surrogate for Obamacare, an insistent citizen reminded the state’s senior senator, “This isn’t just about healthcare,” while another proclaimed, “You are trampling on our Constitution!”

Indeed it isn’t just about healthcare, but whatever bill is signed by Obama, the mutinous state of much of the nation may well impact the 2010 elections nationwide.

As I have detailed in previous HUSTLER columns, Obama has not only channeled Bush and Cheney in his assaults on the Constitution but has also gone further. Even skeptical me expected that the new President would act to get the Democratic Congress to revoke the Bush Administration’s startling rush in December 2008 to expand the FBI’s reach to start an investigation—without any evidence or judicial supervision—of any of us who might somehow have endangered national security.

But President Obama has not said a word about this resurrection of J. Edgar Hoover. In August ’09 I was startled to find out that Obama’s Office of Management and Budget is planning to collect the personal information of every user of federal government Web sites.

Like many Americans, I click onto the White House Web site, as well as those of the Supreme Court, the Congress and a range of government agencies and also those providing information on medical and educational issues.

We’re all familiar with the “cookies” that all kinds of commercial operations can later track as we click on sites that reveal our tastes, buying habits and other patterns of our lives. But never before has the federal government collected our computer cookies when we visit its Web sites.

“No American,” says Christopher Calabrese, counsel for the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project, “should have to sacrifice privacy— or risk surveillance—in order to access free government information.”

Why would the Obama Administration want these cookies? To put us into another of their interconnected databases. Will the government let us know how our cookies are being used? But, of course, they’re classified!

One of my daughters, Jessica Hentoff— known in St. Louis and elsewhere as “The Circus Lady” for running and performing in Circus Harmony, whose troupe travels widely— is a constitutionalist. In reaction to the continually overreaching Obama Administration, she recently sent me a button: “No, you can’t have my rights—I’m still using them.”

Wholly unintentionally, both this and the previous imperious administration have viscerally awakened a considerable number of Americans—but not enough yet—to why and how this constitutional republic has lasted longer than any other such attempts anywhere.

But for the rest of Obama’s first term, not only he will be challenged to remember and act on the Constitution he used to teach at the University of Chicago. In demanding a national independent commission on torture, commentator Carla Seaquist (Seattle Times, August 7, 2009) cited questions that We the People should ask of such a commission—and of ourselves—if we’re to move Congress to set up the commission: “Churchgoers approve torture in greater percentages than nonchurchgoers, by 54 to 42 percent, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. For the love of God, how could this be possible?

“Lawyers for the Bush Administration concocted legal justifications for torture. How did the Department of Justice become the Department of Expediency [as it continues to be under Obama]? Some lawyers working in national security [under Bush and Obama] assert a Commission on Torture would have a ‘chilling effect’ on their actions. … Good. Any notions of bending the law to immoral ends should be chilled.”

So the sometimes-shouting disquiet around the country is not just about healthcare. And it also needs to be about us if we are not to have other such administrations as Bush-Cheney and Obama. It took too many of us too long to remain silently complicit as U.S. and international laws were cruelly broken in our name. Why did it take us so long?

Now, under President Obama, there is an awakening—embodying the spirit of Founding Father Samuel Adams, the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence, who precipitated the still-unfinished American Revolution.

In the spirit of their resistance to King George III, hip humorist Dave Barry cautions: “As Americans, we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.”

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You may purchase the hard copy of the January 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com.

You may purchase a digital copy of the January 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

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