That many Democratic partisans and fervent Obama admirers are vapid, unprincipled hacks willing to justify anything and everything when embraced by Obama - including exactly that which they pretended to oppose under George W Bush - has also been clear for many years. Back in February, 2008, Paul Krugman warned that Obama supporters are "dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." In May, 2009, a once-fervent Obama supporter, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, wrote a column warning that Obama was embracing many of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses and felt compelled - in the very first sentence - to explain what should be self-evident: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." The same month, former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith - who provided the legal authorization for the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program - went to the New Republic to celebrate that Obama was not only continuing the core Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism, but even better (from his perspective), was strengthening those policies far beyond what Bush could achieve by transforming Democrats from opponents of those policies into supporters.
And exactly as Goldsmith happily predicted, polls now show that Democrats and even self-identified progressives support policies that they once pretended to loathe now that it is Obama rather than Bush embracing them. On MSNBC, Obama aides and pundit-supporters now do their best Sarah Palin impression by mocking as weaklings and losers those who think the President should be constrained in his militarism and demonizing as anti-American anyone who questions the military (in between debating whether Obama should be elevated onto Mount Rushmore or given his own monument). A whole slew of policies that would have triggered the shrillest of progressive condemnations under Bush - waging war after Congress votes against authorizing it, the unprecedented persecution and even torturing of whistleblowers, literally re-writing FOIA to conceal evidence of torture, codifying indefinite detention on US soil - are justified or, at best, ignored.
Careful, Greenwald -- talking about that sort of thing will land you in the Crawford ditch with Cindy Sheehan.
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It reminds me of comment during Clinton's first inauguration about an Air Force flyover by some of the left. One person noted that it was horribly gauche to have the military on display at such an event, and the other said "it's OK, they're our fighter jets now", or some such thing.
Oh, the lust of power....
This is (one reason) why I laugh when people call Obama (and 99% of other Democrats) "far left" or some variation thereof.
In this country, we have a center-right party, and the Republicans.
On this issue? Perhaps. But if we look at federal spending or regulation we've got an irresponsible and economically illiterate liberal party, and the Democrats.
I suppose one could say, "Oh goody! We've got balance!" But it's a pretty crappy kind of balance.
This is (one reason) why I laugh when people call Obama (and 99% of other Democrats) "far left" or some variation thereof.
Alternatively, this is (one reason) why I laugh when people called Bush (and 99% of other Republicans) "far right" or some variation thereof.
Brian, I'm thinking that historically, the better explanation for this is "lust for power" or "realizing just in time that his base is bat-s**t crazy on this issue", not that Comrade Blago isn't a leftist. I'm thinking that his rather firm stands on socialized medicine (for it), gun control, and the welfare state establish pretty clearly where he is politically.
We can quibble about whether it "officially" qualifies as socialism in the Swedish or Soviet mold, but on the U.S. scale, he's just to the right of Eugene V. Debs.
Bubba's right it's all about power. The Who put it best when they said Meet the New Boss, the same as the old boss. The only real difference is that a different set of cronies benefit from who is in power. The real story here is that we collectively are nothing more than clueless sheep being led around by a bunch of charlitans.
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