An interesting thread’s been popping up of late. I’ll let Don Surber describe it: [1]
Glenn Reynolds: “Yeah, it’s as if all that talk about the evil power-grabs of the Bush Administration was just insincere electioneering.”
The left is starting to notice that President Obama is doing all those things that Candidate Obama complainted that President Bush was doing.
That’s because President Bush did what you have to do during a war.
You do not give the enemy any legal rights.
That’s insane.
That’s crazy.
And of course, that is the policy of the American left.
Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer, should know this, but he continues to play dumb, demanding unprecedented “rights” for unlawful combatants. Wrote Greenwald: “The Obama DOJ is now squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions.”
Which drew a rebuke from law Professor Reynolds [2]: “Yeah, it’s as if all that talk about the evil power-grabs of the Bush Administration was just insincere electioneering. What made those power-grabs evil, in Obama’s eyes, wasn’t that they were power-grabs. It was that they were by the Bush Administration.”
The old line was from the Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
I tell him in his comments area that all of this goes directly to what I predicted would happen back on January 21st:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/will-obamas-anti-terror-policies-vindicate-bush/ [3]
I dare to suggest that Mr. Bush is going to be vindicated over the next four years by President Obama himself. Vindicated not in rhetoric, since left-wing rhetoric is always and forever vitriolic against any successful Republican. No, Bush will be vindicated thanks to the policies sure to be adopted by Mr. Obama and the Democrat-run Senate, House, and State Dept.
…
For all the vitriol that has been coming from the left, and specifically out of President Obama’s mouth during the campaign, there’s a difference in tone coming out of the Obama camp over the last several weeks. There has been an abandonment of the hot rhetoric of the leftist in favor of of a liberal forced to face the reality of the world around him (i.e., adpopting existing White House policy). The change in tone is a recognition that the rhetoric that the American public was offered during the election was simply not based on reality.
As President Obama and his people are briefed on what has been happening in the world these last eight years, the insider’s view has given them a completely new perspective on what to do about the situation, resulting in completely different actions as compared to the ones they were telling everyone they would take once they were given the power.
As for Greenwald… He simply living up to the well deserved reputation of being the single most intellectually dishonest blogger on the web. For all that I applaud your comments and Reynolds, and will encourage you to keep it up… (And will continue to do so myself) …slapping Greenwald down on this stuff is on many levels taking candy from a baby.
And the part about this that I find rather disturbing is that label of Greenwald as he applies it to George W. Bush … “extremely conservative”. the fact of the matter is that he was anything but conservative, both in terms of international policy and the war and domestic policy with regards to government largess. That’s another piece of reality Obama and his supporters dare not address, and why the policies of Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama are so similar. Mr. Bush was far more liberal in most things than Obama and his supporters will ever dare admit.