Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, Peter Baker reports
on the fallout among American liberals after the
news broke last week about the Obama administration’s secret
memo justifying the use of drones to kill American citizens.
Baker writes:
Conservatives complained that if Mr. Bush had done what Mr.
Obama has done, he would have been eviscerated by liberals and the
news media. But perhaps more than ever before in Mr. Obama’s
tenure, liberals voiced sustained grievance over the president’s
choices.
“That memo coming out, I think, was a wake-up call,” said
Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel of the American
Civil Liberties Union. “These last few days, it was like being back
in the Bush days.”
“It’s causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of
people,” he added. “It’s not the President Obama they thought they
knew.”
Isn't it a little late for a wake-up call? Obama has already
waged a
war in Libya without congressional approval, which is a pretty
good signal that he takes an expansive view of executive power. And
then there's the fact that Obama rammed several very high-profile
government appointments past the U.S. Senate by invoking his recess
appointment power when the Senate was not actually in recess—an
executive power play that Bush
never attempted. But I suppose it's better late than never when
it comes to criticizing presidential overreach.Unfortunately, as Baker also notes, some of the president's
supporters remain immune to the cognitive dissonance even now, as
evidenced by this extraordinary statement from former Michigan Gov.
Jennifer Granholm, who has been rumored to be on Obama's list of
possible Supreme Court nominees:
For four years, Mr. Obama has benefited at least in part from
the reluctance of Mr. Bush’s most virulent critics to criticize a
Democratic president. Some liberals acknowledged in recent days
that they were willing to accept policies they once would have
deplored as long as they were in Mr. Obama’s hands, not Mr.
Bush’s.
“We trust the president,” former Gov. Jennifer Granholm of
Michigan said on Current TV. “And if this was Bush, I think that we
would all be more up in arms because we wouldn’t trust that he
would strike in a very targeted way and try to minimize damage
rather than contain collateral damage.”
… Read More
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