Movie star Matt Damon says he no longer has a crush on President Barack Obama.
“He broke up with me,” Matt Damon said in an interview published online Thursday.
Matt Damon told BET that he and the president “no longer see eye-to-eye”.
“There are a lot of things that I really question, specifically about the Obama administration’s national security posture.”
“The legality of the drone strikes,” Matt Damon said, “and these NSA revelations are – like, you know – Jimmy Carter came out and said we don’t live in a democracy. That’s a little intense when an ex-president says that. So you know, he’s got some explaining to do, particularly for a constitutional law professor.”
Barack Obama has come under fire for presiding over an NSA with a mandate for domestic spying. The agency’s biggest secrets are now exposed publicly since contractor Edward Snowden leaked them to the press and fled to Russia.
And the president has faced growing outrage from Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and other libertarian-minded Republicans, following his Department of Justice’s longtime refusal to guarantee that it won’t use drones to surveil Americans – an assurance it gave only in the face of an embarrassing Senate filibuster.
The White House continues to use unmanned drones as first-strike weapons against terrorism targets overseas.
Matt Damon campaigned aggressively for then-Senator Obama during the 2008 election season. Nine days before the 2008 election, Matt Damon told a room full of volunteers in Florida that they should work hard to “make sure Barack wins”.
But in the president’s second term, the bloom is clearly off the rose.
Matt Damon told reporters in August 2011 that he was “really dissatisfied” with Barack Obama “doubling down” on George W. Bush’s “bad ideas” for education.
Three months later in an interview with Elle magazine Matt Damon said: “I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, <<Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician>>.”
“You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better.”
Matt Damon’s criticism of Barack Obama began in late 2010, and by April 2011 the president was ready to fire back, albeit in good fun.
“It’s fair to say that when it comes to my presidency, the honeymoon is over,” Barack Obama said at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
“Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well Matt, I just saw The Adjustment Bureau so right back atcha buddy.”
Matt Damon has come under fire this week following revelations that despite his long-term advocacy for improving public education, he sends his own children to a private school.
“I pay for a private education and I’m trying to get the one that most matches the public education that I had,” he told The Guardian, “but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system. It’s unfair.”
During a 2011 rally in Washington D.C., Matt Damon told a crowd of teachers that he would not trade his own public school education “for anything”.
Matt Damon’s upcoming film Elysium, which opens Friday, has been panned by conservatives for arguing for a socialist utopia as an alternative to a future world of haves and have-nots.
The Occupy Wall Street-inspired plot line involves a wealthy elite class that has abandoned an overcrowded Earth for a luxury space station, leaving the rest of humanity in crime-ridden and poverty-stricken squalor.
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