DOJ
kill list memo forces many Dems out of the closet as overtly
unprincipled hacks
"Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country's core values in the name of security."
Progressive willingness to acquiesce to or even outright support Obama's radical policies - in the name of partisan loyalty - is precisely what ensures the continuation of those policies. Obama gets away with all of this because so many progressives venerate leader loyalty and partisan gain above all else.
Like Bob Herbert's statement - "policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House" - this is so obvious it should not need to be argued. As former Bush and Obama aide Douglas Ollivant told the NYT yesterday about the "trust" argument coming from some progressives: "That's not how we make policy. We make policy assuming that people in power might abuse it. To do otherwise is foolish."
It is not hyperbole to say that the overarching principle of the American founding was that no political leaders - no matter how kind and magnanimous they seem - could or should be trusted to exercise power in the dark, without checks. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798: "In questions of power . . . let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Six years earlier, John Adams warned: "There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." James Madison, in Federalist 51, explained: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
This is not just basic American political history. It's basic human nature. And the greater the power is - and there is no greater power than targeting citizens for execution - the more urgent those principles are. Watching progressive media figures outright admit that trust in Barack Obama as Leader guides their unprincipled political arguments is only slightly more jarring than watching them embrace that mentality while pretending they're not. Whatever else is true, watching the political movement that spent years marching behind the banner of "due process" and "restraints on presidential power" and "our Constitutional values" now explicitly defend the most radical policy yet justified by the "war on terror" - all because it's their leader doing it - is as nauseating as it is dangerous.
[My Guardian colleague, Gary Younge, has a provocative column from Sunday headlined: "Barack Obama is pushing gun control at home, but he's a killer abroad"]
Last
week's controversy over Obama's assassination program forced into
light many ignored truths that were long obvious
Glenn
Greenwald
Former
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm speaks at the 2012 Democratic
convention. About the DOJ white paper, she admitted this week: "if
this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms"
because "we trust the president". Photograph: Jessica
Rinaldi/Reuters
11
February, 2013
This
past week has been a strangely clarifying political moment. It was
caused by two related events: the leak of the Justice
Department's "white paper"
justifying Obama's claimed power to execute Americans without
charges, followed by John Brennan's alarming
confirmation hearing
(as Charles Pierce wrote: "the man whom the administration has
put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of
the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of
a United States citizen within
the borders of the United States").
I describe last week's process as "strange" because, for
some reason, those events caused large numbers of people for the
first time to recognize, accept and begin to confront truths that
have long been readily apparent.
Illustrating
this odd phenomenon was a much-discussed
New York Times article on Sunday
by Peter Baker which explained that these events "underscored
the degree to which Mr. Obama has embraced some of Mr. Bush's
approach to counterterrorism, right down to a secret legal memo
authorizing presidential action unfettered by outside forces."
It began this way:
"If
President Obama tuned in to the past week's bracing debate on Capitol
Hill about terrorism, executive power, secrecy and due process, he
might have recognized the arguments his critics were making: He once
made some of them himself.
"Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country's core values in the name of security."
Baker
also noticed this: "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."
As but one example, the article quoted Jennifer Granholm, the former
Michigan governor and fervent Obama supporter, as admitting without
any apparent shame that "if
this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms"
because, she said "we trust the president". Thus did we
have - while some
media liberals objected
- scores of progressives and conservatives uniting to overtly embrace
the once-controversial Bush/Cheney premises of the War on Terror
(it's
a global war! the whole world is a battlefield! the president has
authority to do whatever he wants to The Terrorists without
interference from courts!)
in order to defend the war's most radical power yet (the president's
power to assassinate even his own citizens in secret, without
charges, and without checks).
Last
week's "revelations" long known
Although
you wouldn't know it from the shock and outrage expressed over the
last few days, that Barack
Obama
claims the power to order US citizens assassinated without charges
has been known for three full years. It was first
reported
more or less in passing in January, 2010 by the Washington Post's
Dana Priest, and then confirmed
and elaborated
on by both the New York Times and the Washington Post in April, 2010.
Obama first tried to kill US citizen Anwar Awlaki in December 2009
(apparently before these justifying legal memoranda were concocted)
using
cruise missiles and cluster bombs;
they missed Awlaki but killed 52 people, more than half of whom were
women and children. Obama finally succeeded in killing Awlaki and
another American, Samir Khan, in October 2011, and then killed
his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman
in a drone strike two weeks later.
That
Obama is systematically embracing the same premises that shaped the
once-controversial Bush/Cheney terrorism approach has been known for
even longer. All the way back in February, 2009 - one month after
Obama's inauguration - the New York Times' Charlie Savage reported
that "the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued
support for other major elements of its predecessor's approach to
fighting Al Qaeda"
and that this continuity is "prompting growing worry among civil
liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of
Bush-era policies" (I actually wrote
at the time
that Savage's alarmist conclusions were premature and overly
pessimistic, but subsequently told him how right, even prescient, he
turned out to be). In April, 2009, the Obama-friendly TPM site
announced
that "Obama mimics Bush" when it comes to assertions of
extremist secrecy powers. In June, 2010, Obama's embrace - and
expansion - of many of Bush's most radical policies had become so
glaring that ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero gave a speech to
a progressive conference and began by proclaiming
himself to be
"disgusted with this president", while Bush's most hawkish
officials began
praising Obama
for his "continuity" with Bush/Cheney policy.
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.
So
none of this - Obama's assassination program, his general embrace of
Bush/Cheney radicalism, the grotesque eagerness of many Democrats to
justify whatever he does - is at all new. But for some reasons, the
events of last week made all of this so glaring that it could no
longer be denied, and it's worth thinking about why that is.
What
made last week's revelations so powerful?
What
this DOJ "white paper" did was to force people to confront
Obama's assassination program without emotionally manipulative appeal
to some cartoon Bad Guy Terrorist (Awlaki). That document never once
mentioned Awlaki. Instead - using the same creepily clinical,
sanitized, legalistic language used by the Bush DOJ to justify
torture, renditions and warrantless eavesdropping - it set forth the
theoretical framework for empowering not just Obama, but any and all
presidents, to assassinate not just Anwar Awlaki, but any citizens
declared in secret by the president to be worthy of execution.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee wrote
that
the DOJ memo "should shake the American people to the core",
while Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman explained
"the revolutionary and shocking transformation of the meaning of
due process" ushered in by this memo and said it constituted a
repudiation of the Magna Carta.
In
doing so, this document helpfully underscored the critical point that
is otherwise difficult to convey: when you endorse the application of
a radical state power because the specific target happens to be
someone you dislike and think deserves it, you're necessarily
institutionalizing that power in general. That's why political
leaders, when they want to seize extremist powers or abridge core
liberties, always choose in the first instance to target the most
marginalized figures: because they know many people will acquiesce
not because they support that power in theory but because they hate
the person targeted. But if you cheer when that power is first
invoked based on that mentality - I'm
glad Obama assassinated Awlaki without charges because he was a Bad
Man!
- then you lose the ability to object when the power is used in the
future in ways you dislike (or by leaders you distrust), because
you've let it become institutionalized.
This
DOJ document underscored that Obama's claimed due-process-free and
secretly exercised assassinations powers aren't confined to cartoon
super-villain Anwar Awlaki but are now an embedded, institutionalized
part of the American political system going forward. That's why it
provided such a wake-up call for many even though these dangers have
long been obvious.
What
also made this last week unique was the reaction of the American
Right. Progressives love to recite the conceit that Republicans will
never praise Obama no matter what he does. This is a complete sham:
conservatives, including even
Cheney himself,
have repeatedly
lavished praise on Obama
for his embrace of Bush/Cheney policies in these areas. But this past
week, they did so with such effusive enthusiasm that the cognitive
dissonance could not be ignored.
Supreme
GOP warmonger Lindsey Graham announced
his intention
to introduce a Senate resolution praising Obama for his assassination
program. RedState's Erick Erickson wrote
a Fox News column
denouncing civil libertarians and defending Obama: "we must
trust that the president and his advisers, when they see a gathering
of al-Qaida from the watchful eye of a drone, are going to make the
right call and use appropriate restraint and appropriate force to
keep us safe." Michelle Malkin criticized her own staff for
attacking Obama and
wrote:
"On this, I will come to Obama's defense." Others vocally
defending Obama included John
Bolton,
Peter
King,
Newt
Gingrich and Michele Bachmann.
These
are not just Republicans. They are the most extreme, far-right,
warmongering conservatives in the country. And they are all offering
unqualified and enthusiastic praise for Obama and his assassination
program. In our political culture, where everything is viewed through
the lens of partisan conflict and left-right dichotomies, this lineup
of right-wing supporters is powerful evidence of how far Obama has
gone in pursuit of this worldview. That, too, made the significance
of last week's events impossible to ignore.
But
the most significant factor was the behavior of many Democratic
pundits and self-proclaimed progressives. Given how glaring all the
assembled evidence was of Obama's dangerous radicalism, they faced a
serious dilemma: how to fulfill their core purpose - defending Obama
no matter what he does - while maintaining a modicum of dignity and
intellectual coherence?
Some
of them, like MSNBC host Touré Neblett,
invoked the language of John Yoo
to outright defend Obama's assassination powers on the ground of
presidential omnipotence: "he's the Commander in Chief", he
intoned. But the explicit submission to presidential authority
necessary to justify this was so uncomfortably similar to Bush-era
theories, and the very suggestion that MSNBC commentators would be
saying any of that if it had been Bush's program rather than Obama's
was so laughable, that this approach provoked little beyond
widespread ridicule.
A
slightly different approach was chosen by the Daily Beast's Michael
Tomasky, a supremely loyal Obama acolyte. He wrote a
whole column
devoted to pronouncing himself "suspicious of high-horse
denunciations" because the question here is such "a
complicated one". It's so "complicated", he says,
because he's "always written about politics with part of [his]
brain focused on the question of what [he] would do if [he] were in
Politician X's position".
As
Reason
quickly documented,
Tomasky's tone on such matters was radically different during the
Bush years. But the most important point is that the excuse Tomasky
offers for his leader - it must be very difficult to be in the Oval
Office and get these reports about Terror threats and not take action
- is exactly what Bush followers said for years would happen once
Obama or any other Democratic president got into power. Indeed, every
debate in which I ever participated on Bush/Cheney terrorism policies
involved their supporters making exactly the same argument Tomasky
makes in defense of Obama: if you knew what Bush knew, and faced the
hard choices he faced, you would do the same thing to protect the
country: it's easy to condemn these things when you're not in power.
That
is why, as I have
written
many
times before,
Democratic partisans owe a public, sincere, and abject apology to
George Bush and Dick Cheney. It's certainly true that Obama has not
continued many of the policies progressives found so heinous: he
hasn't invaded Iraq or legally authorized waterboarding. But Obama
has completely
reversed himself on so many of the core criticisms he and other
Democrats made
about Bush and Cheney regarding the need for due process for accused
Terrorists, the dangers of radical secrecy, the treatment of
Terrorism as a war on a global battlefield rather than a crime to be
prosecuted. And if Tomasky's excuse is correct - empathy with the
leader's need to Keep Us Safe shows that these are much more
complicated issues than civil libertarians claim - then he and his
fellow partisan soldiers should apologize, since that's exactly what
Bush/Cheney defenders said for years would happen once a Democratic
president was empowered.
The
most honest approach to this quandary has come from those, like
Granholm, who simply admit that they would vehemently object to all
of this if it were done by Bush (or some other GOP President), but
don't do so because it's Barack Obama doing it. This same astonishing
confession was heard from MSNBC host Krystal Ball: "So yeah, I
feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to
speak, is President Obama"; as Digby wrote
about Ball's confession:
"Glenn
Greenwald's been calling this out for years, but I defy him to find a
better example of the hypocrisy that drives him so crazy. Obviously,
this is a fairly common belief among those who believe the President
they voted for is 'good' and the one they don't like is 'bad' but
it's rare that you see anyone boldly say that they think the standard
should be different for their own because well . . . he's a better
person. It takes a certain courage (or blindness) to come right out
and admit it."
Indeed.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews decided
the program was justifiable
because Leon Panetta goes to church often and thus can be trusted.
On
Sunday morning, MSNBC host Chris Hayes devoted a full hour to Obama's
assassination program, and before doing so, he delivered an
excellent monologue
addressing the many progressives who complain any time he critically
covers Obama's actions in this area. He cited an
amazing post by an Obama supporter
who wrote: "I support President Obama's drone attacks. And I
admit that I'm a hypocrite. If a republican administration were
executing these practices, I'd probably join the chorus to condemn
them as unconstitutional, authoritarian or worse".
About that, Hayes said:
"I
think this is probably the most honest defense of the program you'll
hear from liberals. They trust President Obama to wield broad, lethal
executive authority with care and prudence. And besides: it's war;
would you rather, I am often asked by supporters of the kill list,
that we have boots on the ground, big expensive, destructive deadly
disastrous land invasions of countries like the Iraq war? . . . .
"This
narrow choice between big violence and smaller violence shows, I
think, just how fully we have all implicitly adopted the conceptual
framework of the War on Terror, how much George W. Bush's advisers
continue to set the terms of our thinking years after they'd been
dispatched from office. Because that argument presupposes that we are
at war and must continue to be at war until an ill-defined enemy is
vanquished. . . .
"The
Obama administration quite ostentatiously jettisoned the phrase war
on terror from its rhetoric, but it's preserved and further expanded
its fundamental logic and legal architecture."
In
other words, Obama has embraced and expanded the core premises of the
Bush/Cheney global war on terror that Democrats so vehemently claimed
to find offensive, radical, a "shredding of the Constitution".
And they are now supportive for one reason and one reason only: it's
a Democratic president whom they trust - Barack Obama specifically
doing it - rather than a Republican president they distrust. That is
the very definition of vapid, unprincipled partisan hackdom, and it
matters for several reasons.
Why
progressive partisan hackdom matters so much
The
behavior and mindset of Democrats (and self-identified
"progressives")
is significant in its own right because they are now the most
powerful political faction in the US. By the time Obama leaves
office, they will have controlled the White House for 16 out of 24
years. When the current term of Congress ends, they will have
controlled the Senate for the last eight years and the House for the
last four out of eight. They exercise far more power and influence
than the GOP and conservatives, and their attributes are therefore
worthy of discussion in their own right.
During
the right-wing dominance of the Bush era, progressives had little
trouble understanding why right-wing hypocrisy and leader worship
were so dangerous. In early 2006, just a few months after I began
writing about politics, I wrote
about pervasive blind trust and leader-worship among Bush followers
and it was widely cited and cheered by progressives. Just marvel at
how perfectly applicable it is to many Obama-era progressives:
"'Conservatism'
is now
a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as
'liberal' is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no
longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.
. . .
"Indeed,
as many Bush followers themselves admit, the central belief of the
Bush follower's 'conservatism' is no longer one that [subscribes] to
a limited federal government - but is precisely that there
ought to be no limits on the powers claimed by Bush precisely because
we trust him, and we trust in him absolutely. He wants to protect us
and do good. He is not our enemy but our protector. And
there is no reason to entertain suspicions or distrust of him or his
motives because he is Good.
"We
need no oversight of the Federal Government's eavesdropping powers
because we trust Bush to eavesdrop in secret for the Good. We need no
judicial review of Bush's decrees regarding who is an 'enemy
combatant' and who can be detained indefinitely with no due process
because we trust Bush to know who is bad and who deserves this.
We need no restraints from Congress on Bush's ability to exercise war
powers, even against American citizens on US soil, because we trust
Bush to exercise these powers for our own good . . . .
"And
in that regard, [Bush followers] are not conservatives. They are
authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of
government but to strong authority through a single leader."
To
many conservatives, Bush could and should be trusted to exercise
extreme powers in the dark because he was a Good evangelical
Christian family man with heartland cowboy values. To many
progressives, Obama can and should be trusted because he's a Good
sophisticated East Coast progressive and family man with urbane
constitutional scholar values. It's lowly reality TV viewing and rank
cultural tribalism masquerading as political ideology.
Beyond
the inherent dangers of fealty to political leaders for partisan
gain, this behavior has a substantial effect on the ability to fight
radical government policies. Progressives often excuse Obama's
embrace of these extremist Bush/Cheney terror policies on the ground
that Americans support these policies and therefore he's constrained.
But that claim reverses causation: it is true that politicians
sometimes follow public opinion, but it's also true that public
opinion often follows politicians.
In
particular, whenever the two political parties agree on a policy, it
is almost certain that public opinion will overwhelmingly support it.
When Obama was first inaugurated in 2009, numerous
polls
showed pluralities
or even majorities in support
of investigations into Bush-era criminal policies of torture and
warrantless eavesdropping.That was because many Democrats believed
Obama would pursue such investigations (because he led them to
believe he would), but once he made clear he opposed those
investigations, huge numbers of loyal Democrats followed their leader
and joined Republicans in opposing them, thus creating majorities
against them.
Obama
didn't refrain from investigating Bush-era crimes because public
opinion opposed that. The reverse was true: public opinion supported
those investigations, and turned against them only once Obama
announced he opposed them. We see this over and over: when Obama was
in favor of closing Guantanamo and ending Bush-era terrorism
policies, large percentages supported him (and even elected him as he
advocated that), but then once he embraced those policies as his own,
large majorities switched and began
supporting them.
Progressive willingness to acquiesce to or even outright support Obama's radical policies - in the name of partisan loyalty - is precisely what ensures the continuation of those policies. Obama gets away with all of this because so many progressives venerate leader loyalty and partisan gain above all else.
What's
most remarkable about this willingness to endorse extremist policies
because you "trust" the current leader exercising them is
how painfully illogical it is, and how violently contrary it is to
everything Americans are taught from childhood about their country.
It should not be difficult to comprehend that there is no such thing
as vesting a Democratic President with Power X but not vesting a GOP
President with the same power. To endorse a power in the hands of a
leader you like is, necessarily, to endorse the power in the hands of
a leader you dislike.
Like Bob Herbert's statement - "policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House" - this is so obvious it should not need to be argued. As former Bush and Obama aide Douglas Ollivant told the NYT yesterday about the "trust" argument coming from some progressives: "That's not how we make policy. We make policy assuming that people in power might abuse it. To do otherwise is foolish."
It is not hyperbole to say that the overarching principle of the American founding was that no political leaders - no matter how kind and magnanimous they seem - could or should be trusted to exercise power in the dark, without checks. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798: "In questions of power . . . let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Six years earlier, John Adams warned: "There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." James Madison, in Federalist 51, explained: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
This is not just basic American political history. It's basic human nature. And the greater the power is - and there is no greater power than targeting citizens for execution - the more urgent those principles are. Watching progressive media figures outright admit that trust in Barack Obama as Leader guides their unprincipled political arguments is only slightly more jarring than watching them embrace that mentality while pretending they're not. Whatever else is true, watching the political movement that spent years marching behind the banner of "due process" and "restraints on presidential power" and "our Constitutional values" now explicitly defend the most radical policy yet justified by the "war on terror" - all because it's their leader doing it - is as nauseating as it is dangerous.
[My Guardian colleague, Gary Younge, has a provocative column from Sunday headlined: "Barack Obama is pushing gun control at home, but he's a killer abroad"]
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