How many times will Obama have to bow to President Bush’s superior war leadership before liberals start to realize that President Bush was right about the war?
President Obama’s endorsements of Bush-Cheney antiterror policies are by now routine: for example, opposing the release of prisoner abuse photographs and support for indefinite detention for some detainees, and that’s just this week. More remarkable is White House creativity in portraying these U-turns as epic change. Witness yesterday’s announcement endorsing military commissions.
White House officials insist that their tribunals will be kinder and gentler, stressing additional due-process safeguards for terrorists on trial for war crimes. But the debate that has convulsed the political system since 9/11 isn’t about procedural nuances. It has been over core principles, with Democrats decrying a “shadow justice system” and claiming that “Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”
The latter quote is from a speech by Senator Obama in 2007 denouncing “a legal framework that does not work.” He also referred to the civilian criminal justice system and courts martial that Democrats then claimed, and many still claim, are the right venues for antiterror prosecutions. After the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision gave terrorists habeas rights, Mr. Obama again laid into the Bush Administration’s “legal black hole” and “dangerously flawed legal approach,” which “undermines the very values we are fighting to defend.”
At least some people in the White House must now be embarrassed by their boss’s switcheroo…
Indeed. Look, credit to Obama for doing the right thing here and in other aspects of anti-terror policy. While I do worry that not enough grit is evident in the Obama Administration to tough it out when things go wrong, I am pleased that – for the most part – Obama’s campaign rhetoric about the war has proven to be just that: campaign rhetoric. Dangerous and slanderous rhetoric, to be sure. It is now abundantly clear that the decision to oppose President Bush’s war policy was based entirely upon the desire to be in opposition rather than the result of careful reasoning.
The kook left base, of course, just took their marching orders – they were told that President Bush was a war criminal, and that is what they believe…but, what now? The war criminal is now being copied, in great detail and with only cosmetic changes, by The One – what are kook lefties to do now? Hopefully, they’ll start thinking and come to the understanding that their leaders are interested in power and not much else. The path to power was to be paved with making the heroic President Bush into the odious President Bush. Mission Accomplished, as it were. But now Obama has to govern and he can’t afford to allow any weakness on his part to result in even one American death being traced to a change in policy between himself and President Bush. If Obama were to really release the hard-core Gitmo detainees and even one of them were to kill an American in a terrorist act, that would be end game for Obama – he’d be crushed in a landslide in 2012, regardless of what else happened. He knows this – too bad his supporters don’t seem to realize it.
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