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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFrank Rich on the Obama = Bush comparisons
Q: A number of sources in the Times piece allege that essentially Obama's "war on terror" is the same as Bush's with less boneheaded stagecraft. Do you think that's accurate?Rich: Thats a stretch. The Bush administration heedlessly practiced torture, gleefully flouted the law, and bragged of its dead or alive game plan even as it let bin Laden get away and let the Taliban regroup in Afghanistan. The Bushies were not only an outlaw gang, but a gang that couldnt shoot straight. As if that werent enough, they undermined national security by ginning up a war, catastrophic in length and cost, to prevent a nuclear attack from a country that had no nuclear weapons whatsoever. The focused Obama counterterrorism policy, whatever ones criticisms of it, is not to be confused with the cornucopia of Bush misadventures and mishaps. And as for counterterrorism itself, there has been no 9/11 on Obamas watch, knock wood. Let us not forget that there was one on Bush-Cheneys.
The rest of the interview: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/05/frank-rich-mitts-bleach-bottle-bimbo.html
Enrique
(27,461 posts)the "Bush=Obama" question asks about something I don't even see in the article, and the article contains all of the points Rich makes and more, pointing out the differences between Bush and Obama.
The first question is more relevant and Rich's answer is more interesting:
A. The Times report, seemingly unassailable, offers a chilling snapshot of the president himself poring over kill lists of terrorists as if they were baseball cards. More chilling, perhaps, is that he does so with a surfeit of self-righteousness. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions, as one line in the article has it. I have nothing against aggressive counterterrorism. But almost any time an American commander in chief, however patriotic in his national-security intentions, starts to play God, fudge bedrock values by looking for lawyerly constitutional loopholes, and micromanage military targets, we get in trouble whether it was L.B.J. and Nixon in Vietnam, or Bushs proxy Cheney in Iraq and Afghanistan. Im glad Obama took out bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. But civilian deaths and botched missions will mint new terrorists no matter how many moles we whack. The more sunlight on whats going on, the better. Unfortunately, since both of Americas wars have fallen off the map of public consciousness, its not clear how much of a ripple the Times report made beyond high-end news consumers.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)"I'm glad Obama took out . . . Anwar al-Awlaki." So glad, in fact, that I'm willing to bet that al-Awlaki's name never passed Rich's lips prior to his summary execution. But he's "glad" now about it, which sort of contradicts Rich's other statements about fudging bedrock values and suchlike.
Fudge it all you want, it's still a crime against humanity. I don't want or need a president who's going to preserve, protect and defend the United States. I want a president who preserves, protects and defends the Constitution. At this time we still have a country, and we still call it the United States, but it isn't the country described in the Constitution, with the checks and the balances and the due process and the trials and the evidence presented against the accused in open court.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)appreciated.