You've finally realized this is yet another circus, what are you going to do differently?
(And remember, this was from the hope & change guy in favor of transparency who now "personally signs off" (his words) on drone strikes on American citizens, extended & expanded the PATRIOT Act, and made indefinite detention an actual law.)
"It is clear that this annoying and utterly useless website is designed to nothing more than channel political activism into a cul-de-sac, and therefore we request you stop this irritating sideshow and shut down petitions.whitehouse.gov."
I misread the UI and thought they had a lot more signatures.
Another somewhat similar petition cleared the 25,000 sig threshold in October. Here is what the White House said:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/were-listening-ser...
You do not need this. This is garbage site to entertain people in thinking they have a say in Power, while they clearly do not.
This is basically the entire premise behind a representative democracy, is it not?
The purpose of democracy is not to provide overriding legitimacy for any and every use of power, nor to create a nexus of external responsibility to which every question, irrespective of its nature or native context, can be outsourced without deleterious consequence.
Government is a single, well-defined institution within society, and democracy is a method for keeping that institution within its appropriate boundaries.
We can do better than this.
One sad thing is that this is one of the few petitions I've seen that actually should be addressed to the White House.
There are a lot of ways to get involved in our democracy, but most of them are harder than tweeting.
Hacker News.
(I like the one that wants to repeal the Bill of Rights so that you can't make fun of Moses, Mohammed, or Jesus. What? Who let these people onto the Internet anyway?)
;)
