Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?

[Demeter]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/dear-andrew-sullivan-why-focus-on-obamas-dumbest-critics/251528/

After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (14) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you'd have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You'd have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn't have to choose between our values and our safety.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.... No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power?

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[Bluenorthwest]

2. Sully was a huge cheerleader for W/Shooter, and also an outspoken critic of all who

protested the Iraq War, whom he painted as stupid and unpatriotic while he praised Rummy and Cheney. Sully was extremely wrong, not only in his own opinions on the war, also he was wrong to take the next step, a step his work always contains, Sully had to characterize and slander those who did not agree with him and with Cheney. Had Sully 'just' supported the war, his rants would 'just' seem ignorant now. When he added all those words to frame the anti war people as old hippies and fools, he entered the McCarthy zone. When he finally admitted how wrong he was on the war, and offered a few words admitting he was wrong when the protesters where right, most people would from then on take care not to launch into attacks on people who disagree with some policy or opinion of his. Sully continued to do so. When he 'apologized' for the harm he did to America (his words) he claimed he'd always feel guilty for his wrong headed arrogance, yet within a week he was pontificating as if he was a man of tested wisdom and also tearing into anyone who did not follow the Sully Gospel to the letter.
Just saying. He called critics of the Iraq 'War' stupid as well. He was not correct then, and he has done nothing since that set of errors which would lead a rational person to think he knows anything. He always includes some name calling toward those who do not agree with him, and let us not forget that when it mattered the most, he was calling all who opposed Cheney's wars lots of names, that is most of us on DU.

[xchrom]

3. DU has gone a long way to try and act like that jerk is rehabilitated.

why sensible democrats crush on this man is beyond me.