President Obama doesn’t like online poker too much. I understand that presidents from George Washington up to the present have all done things that make the citizenry wonder, but the Department of Justice’s attack against online poker sites, and thus their patrons, makes me wonder what is going on in that Harvard head of his.
Sometimes politicians do things that just scream hypocrisy. It doesn’t really matter what the President of the United States is called. His last name could be Bush, Roosevelt, Kennedy or Jefferson. In the end, they all have a level of hypocrisy about them, untruths that battle against their core belief system. Even Honest Abe was not immune.
Now it’s Obama’s turn.
The War on Terror took a positive turn with the killing of Osama Bin Laden earlier this month, and the nation is still rejoicing that victory. Roughly two weeks before that, however, President Obama waged war against online poker players and their favorite gambling sites with equal effectiveness. On the day known by online poker players as “Black Friday,” the Department of Justice, an extension of the Obama administration, hit the three largest online poker sites with federal indictments of fraud and conspiracy. Among the poker sites that were hit with federal charges are PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. As a result, Americans are struggling as they try to find an outlet for their online poker fix.
There is little doubt that these sites, while based overseas to avoid these complications, have broken United States law. Granted, one of the statutes in question was passed because the gambling industry was being run by the mafia back in the glory days of the Tommy Gun. The other was randomly added to legislation quickly and without a lot of thought as part of the conservative social agenda.
Regardless of when and why, the law is the law, and according to U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, this could be the tip of the iceberg. “As charged, these defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits,” said Bharara. “Moreover, as we allege, in their zeal to circumvent the gambling laws, the defendants also engaged in massive money laundering and bank fraud. Foreign firms that choose to operate in the United States are not free to flout the laws they don’t like simply because they can’t bear to be parted from their profits.”
Most of the time, I’m a “follow the rules as they are written” kind of guy. We have laws for a reason, and it’s the President’s job as the head of the executive branch to enforce them. However, as I grow older and pay more and more attention to politics, I have come to realize that all presidents have a history of not enforcing all laws with equal measure. President Obama, along with most of the presidents before him, has chosen not to follow immigration law to the letter, but woe be to those folks minding their own business in their own living rooms playing online poker with $.01 and $.02 blind antes.
Keeping that in mind, it’s very disappointing that the Department of Justice picked this law and this group of folks to pick on. This president has dished out billions upon billions to huge corporations and special interest through bailout and TARP funds. He’s held the hands of special interest from one coast to the other. So who do you go after? Who do you try to take money from when you have a revenue problem? Apparently, you try to extort more than $3 billion from the online poker websites.
And let me be clear; this is not a Republican blow-hard piece. The Republicans are the ones to blame for this being illegal in the first place. According to The Economist, many of the regulations at the core of the issue were “hastily tacked onto the end of unrelated legislation” back in 2006. The main supporters of the online gambling provisions in question are four Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Jim Leach of Iowa and Robert Goodlatte of Virginia spearheaded the effort in their house while we can thank Jon Kyl of Arizona and the former majority leader Bill Frist in the Senate. Frist and Leach are retired from Congress, but Kyl and Goodlatte are both chugging along in the United States Congress.
But back to the President. The level of hypocrisy by this administration is barely fathomable. The Department of Justice dropped its investigation against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. The Civil Rights Commission called dropping this case an “inappropriate” action by the Obama administration. The case in question involved members of the New Black Panther Party brandishing a nightstick and intimidating white voters in Philadelphia- an action that was caught on video. The Department of Justice has bigger fish to fry than holding sacrosanct the right to freely vote.
I guess the big fish was preventing the thousands of American pro online poker players from making their living and the countless more that decide to play a $2.10 sit and go Texas hold ‘em tournament on PokerStars instead of watching a rerun of King of Queens. I’m struggling to find the rationalization here. Other countries get it, why not ours?
When playing poker online, it’s amazing to see the global community meeting on these poker sites. I played mostly on PokerStars.com, mostly in small buy-in tables and tournaments. The site is full of international players that are now apparently freer in their country than the citizens of the United States. Today, on any of the major online poker sites, you can still see tons of Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans and South Americans populating the servers daily. Now that America can no longer play online poker, the Russians will likely have more online players than any other nation in the world. You would think the Soviet Union won the Cold War.
Somewhere, shivering in their cold, Russian graves, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin are laughing at how un-American that America has become. I’ll simply say this- President Obama, this change stinks.
