What does Obama think about this week's nationwide Occupy crackdown?

Lynn Parramore has 6 Burning Questions About the Violent Crackdowns on Occupations Around the Country Alternet 11/15/2011. The one I find most interesting is this one (emphasis in original):

What, if any, was the role of the White House? Who was in charge of following the nationwide Occupy crackdown at the White House? What does President Obama, the man who celebrated the uprisings in Egypt (and who is currently out of the US, in Asia), think about the raids and the encroachments on the civil liberties of peacefully protesting Americans? As a constitutional scholar, what is his view of the restrictions of the press and the arrests of journalists?

Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said when he was on the verge of making a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler Germany. And we know that foreign relations produces even more routine hypocrisy than day-to-day domestic politics.

And in fairness to President Obama, he was late in expressing enthusiasm for the activism of the Arab Awakening.

Yet we have had months this year in which the Arab Awakening was celebrated by the media and our politicians, normally in the self-congratulating triumphalism that approved of how the primitive Arabs were copying us enlightened Americans.

Now we have a brutal crackdown on a nationwide protest movement that raises real questions about the practical limits of freedom of speech today and about the willingness of the urban police to enforce the law, rather than to uphold the authority and protect the convenience of the 1%.

I would certainly like to hear the Democratic President express himself clearly on this subject.

Tags: barack obama, occupy wall street

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