Message #147307

[Bianca]

UPDATE:



Immediately reacting to speeches of this type, as I've done here, is always a perilous undertaking, since it generally helps to be able to reflect on what one has heard.  It ought to be apparent that my reaction to Obama's speech was fairly mixed.  There were some very well-delivered and well-argued parts -- ones that were important.  And one sees the potency of the bipartisan political opposition -- and the vindictive conniving from some of  Washington's permanent power centers in the intelligence and military community -- triggered by even by the mildest of changes, such as the closing of Guantanamo and the release of the OLC memos.  Challenging that opposition, even rhetorically, entails political costs and deserves some credit.  But I'm always going to assess Obama based on what he does, not on what he says.

Ultimately, what I find most harmful about his embrace of things like preventive detention, concealment of torture evidence, opposition to investigations and the like is that these policies are now no longer just right-wing dogma but also the ideas that many defenders of his -- Democrats, liberals, progressives -- will defend as well.  Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.  The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.

So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.  In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing.  That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."