The "Chen Affair"

I’m not going to evaluate the Obama Administration’s handling of the “Chen affair,” pro or con, firstly because I don’t have all the facts of the matter and never will, and secondly because if the administration decided that relations between the two nations is more important than the fate of one individual I don’t think I’m inclined to disagree with them.

What’s interesting to me is the reactions expressed in the various commentaries that I’m reading. One person said that it meant that “the U.S. remains the power of the future simply by default.” I asked in the comments why that would be so, and he replied that it was because it indicated the China’s leadership was “insecure in its own legitimacy.”

I asked then, what he thought was the difference between that and our treatment of Bradley Manning and other whistle blowers, and he and other commenters offered a rather wide variety of reasons why there was a huge difference between us imprisoning people who challenge the government under conditions that international agencies claim amounts to torture and China doing so. I won’t bother to list them, because they all pretty much boiled down to “it’s okay when we do it because our government is legitimate and theirs is not.”

I’m always rather fascinated by the way the Obamabot mind functions. First they claim that our government has been corrupted by the 1% and the “Citizen’s United” decision of the Supreme Court, which would seem to indicate that they question the legitimacy of our government. Then, when you question anything the Obama Administration does, they get all huffy and ask, “How dare you question the legitimacy of our government?"

Apparently they think that Republicans are corrupted by money while Democrats are not, but they also brag that Obama is raising orders of magnitude more money than Romney is. Presumably they believe that Obama is spending that money but not influencing anyone in the process, which makes one wonder why he is raising and spending it.