FINALLY, Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) gives us, the public, pages and pages (hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents) about its surveillance state. To be sure, it’s a surveillance state built on top of the George W. Bush surveillance state.
This is quite a lot to think about — documents we can incorporate into American political thought. It is not likely to constitute the kind of thought that would make anyone proud to proclaim that they are American, yet it’s definitely bipartisan, so the GOP should stop its yapping about Obama’s hypocrisy and start wondering how a liberal got so “hard” after decades of being supposedly soft and liberal. And Obama should think about how to start forgiving Snowden, rather than trying to be the most effective president to prosecute leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”
FINALLY, Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) gives us, the public, pages and pages (hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents) about its surveillance state. To be sure, it’s a surveillance state built on top of the George W. Bush surveillance state.
