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Published on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 by The Atlantic
Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus On Obama's Dumbest Critics?
A conversation-changing defense of the president exaggerates Obama's accomplishments and misses the point: his scandalous transgressions against rule of law
After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?
No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power? (Image credit: Reuters)
(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.
I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you'd have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You'd have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn't have to choose between our values and our safety.
Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.
Pretend that you knew, circa 2008, that President Cheney or Palin or Rice or Rumsfeld or Giuliani would do all those things -- but that, on the bright side, they'd refrain from torturing anyone else, end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, sign a bank bailout, and pass a health-care bill that you regard as improving on the status quo starting in 2014. Would you vote for them on that basis?
I submit that you would not. And if they were elected, and four years later were running for re-election, would you focus on the stupidity of the least persuasive attacks on their tenure? Or would you laud their most incisive critics? I believe that you'd be among their most incisive critics.
Back to the present.
The Newsweek cover headline for Sullivan's piece is "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" It's entirely defensible to point out that many critiques of Obama are laughably disconnected from reality -- I've done that myself on many occasions -- so it's arguably a fair headline.
But the one I've chosen is fair too: "Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?"
No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power?
He may yet.
Over the years, Sullivan has confronted, as few others have, American transgressions abroad, including torture, detainee abuse, and various imperial ambitions. He's long drawn attention to civil-liberties violations at home too, as a solo blogger and as lead editor and writer of a blogazine. When I worked for Sullivan, he not only published but actively encouraged items I found that highlighted civil-liberties abuses by the Obama Administration, and since I parted ways with The Daily Dish, he and the Dish team have continued to air critiques of Obama on these questions.
But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.
Sullivan should reconsider this approach.
During President Bush's first term, Sullivan will recall the most unhinged attacks on him -- the comparisons to Hitler, the puppets burned in effigy, the comparisons to a chimp. There wasn't anything wrong with lamenting those attacks, just as there's nothing wrong with pointing out exaggerated and baseless attacks on Obama, which have spread through most of the Republican Party. But the priority put on rebutting the least persuasive left-wing critiques of Bush, and pre-election 2004 worrying about the flaws of the Democratic field, are part of what postponed the backlash against Bush's ruinous policies. The backlash should've been the priority all along.
The same is now true of Obama. Like President Bush, he is breaking the law, transgressing against civil liberties, and championing a radical view of executive power -- and he is invoking the War on Terror to get away with it. As much as it was in 2003 or 2007, it is vital in 2012 that there be a backlash against these post-9/11 excesses, that liberty-loving citizens push back so that these are anomalies that are reined in, rather than permanent features of a bipartisan consensus that can only end in a catastrophically abusive executive operating in an office stripped by successive presidents and their minions of both constitutional and prudential checks.
Beyond strenuously objecting to the focus of his piece and what it doesn't mention, and agreeing with some of Sullivan's points, I have important disagreements with others. "Where Bush talked tough and acted counter-productively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war," Sullivan writes. "Since he took office, al Qaeda's popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted." But it's surely relevant that, according to surveys like this one from James Zogby in 2011, "After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia)." And in the areas where Obama's drone strikes are killing innocent civilians, he is trading short-term terrorist deaths for the possibility that our policies will create more terrorists in the long run. It's a tradeoff some people consider prudent; but that's different from saying he is "winning the propaganda war." In fact, the predictable effect of some of his policies is to increase hatred of the U.S.
© 2012 The Atlantic
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46 Comments so far
Show AllNewsweek is part of the corporate media so it's going to provide articles that don't ask those kinds of questions that would lead to questioning the policy. They have to stay within the bounds of the framework that American exceptionalism is real and needs to be promoted.
Huh. I thought that magazine was called Newspeak.
My bad.
While Conor does an excellent job of capturing Obama's regressive missions accomplished, he could write another article identifying Obama's less successful attempts at regression. One of the first examples would be Obama's attempt during his first month in office to allow the president to bail out banks without Congressional approval.
This attempt was especially hypocritical when you consider how many times candidate Obama criticized the GOP's unitary executive philosophy and actions.
A journalist writes his opinion on another journalist's opinion. Relevant and heady stuff.
Quite relevant, Robert.
Journalists are major players in the political sphere. Opining on their opinions is a major function of the comment section in Common Dreams and other sites.
When a columnist uses his platform to defend or promote sketchy administration policies, it's always relevant to deal with the points raised.
It's called "debating".
Debates are great. There`s no debate over that. But, when debates are the equivalent of how many angels stand on the head of a pin, then it is a rather pointless intellectual game. The key to an intellectual debate is the context. What passes for riveting debate today is always the partisanship of the pot calling the kettle black gussied up as intellectual insight, and like most sports, if you haven`t placed a bet, the game is not too interesting, unless you`re a player. But then, I am not a debater.
The parameters of political debates are so tight that it is faux debating...total theatrics and no substance.
LOL - I had no idea
Good points; good articles-for-impeachment. "Radical Kenyan anti-colonialist". What a joke. He demonstrates the same behavior as Louis E. Tackwood (a coerced agent-provocateur), of "The Glass House Tapes" fame. The O is a neo-colonialist, enabling the conversion of sovereign, democratic "99er" nations, into slave colonies for the global financier/corporate empire. This makes #13 the most damning indictment (ie. installing wallstreet "agents-of-empire" in his admin) as it will lead to MUCH MORE death & destruction than all the others combined (the "Empire" is already of the opinion that there are too many slaves onboard planet Earth; they only need a billion or so, at most. This is not a joke. It's policy, "nothing personal").
Alternate Late Histories of The United States:
George Quagmire Bush
Barack Quagmire Obama
Mitt Quagmire Romney
George Quagmire Bush
Barack Quagmire Obama
Barack Quagmire Obama
Moral of these stories: Critics should have used the word "quagmire" more.
The military industrial complex (MIC) defines quagmire as the means to assure eternal occupations and wars that result in an eternal revenue stream for the MIC.
The president's job description includes a line requiring the president to maintain eternal quagmires.
And the financiers use their servant MIC, and its' quagmire, to keep the 99ers permanently off-balance, distracted, starved of very necessary funds for their own growth, development, and welfare (don't want the slaves to get too uppity). If we just agreed to be servile, ignorant to all things except our slaves' duties, and die young of plagues (ie. no healthcare), they'd probably quit beating us with the "stick" of manufactured war.
P.S. The revenue stream is the financiers' reward to their "good & faithful servant", the MIC. The revenue stream is, itself, a false, made-up artifact of the financiers, created from thin air. Whatta racket. These guys are like black magicians, working with illusion towards evil ends.
The only reason Andrew Sullivan has his place in the blogosphere is because he wrote for the NY Times. and the only reason he wrote for the Times was that they were thrilled to find a conservative gay person to write for them just like the Repugs were thrilled to find Herman Cain. In his way Sullivan is just as much of a clown as Cain. Read his idiot article on testosterone from the Times.
Mr. Freiderstorf's article is pretty good, except for this:
"Pretend that you knew, circa 2008, that President Cheney or Palin or Rice or Rumsfeld or Giuliani would do all those things -- but that, on the bright side, they'd refrain from torturing anyone else, end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, sign a bank bailout, and pass a health-care bill that you regard as improving on the status quo starting in 2014. Would you vote for them on that basis?"
For gays, there is a plus, if you think killing persons of foreign nations is worthy of your identity, sexual, or otherwise.
I am clueless as to why the banker bailout is placed on the "plus" list.
And only a fool would consider the give-away to the "health" insurance companies anything of remote help to already struggling (to pay bills, maintain homes, and retain jobs) Americans.
There are NO plusses with Obama. The earlier list of transgressions could be expanded to include:
1. Obama's inroads into cutting Social Security
2. Obama's lack of support for the citizen initiative to rope in the kingly transgressions of Scott Walker
3. Obama's refusing to consider the Single Payer system...and closing doors on those medical doctors that supported it.
Since most people entirely lack imagination, the writer's placing Newt in the role of determining who he'd be free to place indefinitely under lock and key "thanks" to NDAA is better driven home. That "law" fundamentally usurps all others and puts our national "leadership" on a par with the Taliban.
A good article! This is especially true for robot supporters of the president.
Throw in some Glenn Greenwald, Jeff Cohen, and many others and we might just get an informed populace.
Obama didn't just "close the door on doctors promoting single payer medical insurance", he had them arrested.
Obama and his rainforest rubber stamp Senator Patty Murray then had the audacity to parade a ten year old orphan (whose mother was killed by the medical insurance industry) in front of Congress when they executed the Obamacare legislation in March 2010.
BREAKING:
http://dailybail.com/home/obama-considering-larry-summers-to-head-world-bank.html
I hope the "lefty" RP supporters out there bear this in mind - advancing the "wonderful plusses" while refusing to acknowledge the egregious minuses puts them in the same position - another blind man describing the elephant ... A head long jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
This is all the more absurd when there IS a candidate out there who will deal with these issues without asking progs to make a Sophie's choice ....
Reject both wings of the duopoly ...
http://www.jillstein.org
"Sullivan will recall the most unhinged attacks on him (Bush) -- the comparisons to Hitler, the puppets burned in effigy, the comparisons to a chimp."
I agree that the comparisons to chimps and Hitler were unfair -- to chimps and Hitler. Especially chimps.
Hitler's body count was actually quite small when compared to the institutional violence and genocide of the American state. The "Black Book of Communism" (rightly or wrongly) attributes about 100 million deaths to that (nominal) philosophy; similar numbers can be attributed to mid-twentieth century fascism; however both pale in comparison to the American empire.
According to the WHO, around 10 million children under the age of five die EACH YEAR due to easily preventable causes. "Almost all of these children could survive with access to simple and affordable interventions". Any American President in the modern age is at least partly responsible for failing to prioritize this genocide, and intercede; in fact, through promoting "free trade" agreements and war, all of them have exacerbated the tendency rather than mitigate it.
Obviously no one man can be considered individually responsible for the operations of global capitalism. But the same can be said of Hitler and fascism. Indeed, Bush's grandfather Prescott was one of Adolph's biggest backers, laundering money for steel baron Fritz Thyssien and the Third Reich through the Union Banking Corporation.
In the press and much of academia, fascism is presented as a sort of deranged system created by "great men" like Hitler, when in fact it was supported by the ruling class as a a whole -- everyone from Churchill to (initially) Roosevelt (see their early comments about Franco and Mussolini) to Rockefeller and Melon. It was highly rational, exceedingly well funded and explicitly designed to put an end to any vestiges of working class solidarity.
One can argue about the relative power held by the likes of Hitler or Bush/Obama -- clearly Hitler had more individual power (and panache) than a semi-puppet like Junior or Barry -- but when it comes to body counts the primary difference between the Third Reich and America is method; Hitler had a cruder, more direct (and ultimately less efficient) approach while the Fourth Reich is much, much more sophisticated. Since the American empire is global, its functionaries are responsible, in any given year, for far more deaths than the Nazis. A bullet, a gas pellet, a proxy war, a bank-bailout rather than clean water for a child in Africa, death is death.
The neocons and neoliberals realized that a goose-stepping, militaristic, overtly racist fascism would not be sellable to the middle class that FDR had recently created.
As long as Obama tosses out a few well timed populist platitudes, most of his base ignores his actions, no matter how regressive and fascist.
I subscribe to Newsweek, so I can see what the corporate press is publishing. I read that cover article by Sullivan, which was so pro-Obama. I voted for him in 2008. I may do it again, with the understanding that he is indeed the "lesser of two evils," but evil he is. My hope for a future is in the Occupy movement, which is outside the electoral realm. Here in Sonoma County, Northern California, we are in the process of founding a North Bay Occupied Press. In my nearly 70 years of life, most of which have been as a radical (return to the root), rather than as a liberal, the Occupy movement is the most exciting thing that has happened here in the U.S.. May it not get side-tracked into electoral politics.
And if the Occupy movement does not get so "sidetracked" - TPTB remain in charge of an enormously powerful government apparatus that can screw around with Occupy big time if it is seen to be interfering with TPTB's agenda.
Like it or not, Occupy needs a political arm - even the IRA understood that it needed one ...
So, if you really like Occupy, why would you vote for an "evil", any evil, lesser or not, when you obviously recognize that that evil is counter to just about everything Occupy stands for?
I'm not so sure. It's possible that manifesting a political arm would be fatal to the movement. The context is quite different from that the IRA existed/exits in. One of the primary points of Occupy is that the system is broken--perhaps beyond repair. Placing faith in the existing political architecture as a tenable agent of change ultimately dis-empowers us all. So I agree that voting, when the choice is between Tweedle dee and Tweedle dumb,is probably counterproductive. And as long as the political structure ensures the continuation of the duopoly, the tenable choices will always be Tweedle dee and Tweedle dumb. Separate from the machine.
"voting, when the choice is between Tweedle dee and Tweedle dumb,is probably counterproductive.
Agreed, so make a different choice - the Green platform has been pretty much a glove fit for OWS since before there was an OWS - they need to at least explore it ...
http://www.jillstein.org
Do you know who owns newsweek?
Jane Harman's husband. Look it up on wikipedia....
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/12/19/damning-the-damnable-jane-harman/
With every activity, every purchase, every conversation, every meal, you cast your ballot. The circus every four years is just that.
I saw the Newsweek cover in the bookstore earlier today and my immediate reaction was Newsweek was feeding the Obamabots and Demobots some fodder so that they could self-justify supporting Obama and the Democrats again this fall. Although this Newsweek article is oriented towards Obama, I believe Newsweek is more interested in ensuring the masses don't lose faith in the duopolisitic political parties and the system they've created. Good, timely article by Friedersdorf of The Atlantic.
Living in Wasilla, I have heard more times than I can recount, every Manchurian candidate, Obama is a Kenyan, he's firing up the FEMA camps to imprison us, and he's gonna take away our guns, conspiracy theory!
On the other side of the coin, are my neo liberal friends, who recount Obama's many accomplishments, and refuse to even consider that Obama is anything other than the greatest president to ever reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The big question is how do we address the problem of Obama once again attaining the oval office, and what happens if the Repugs win. These are some serious issues, with no real solutions. We're damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
I'm not going to vote for Obama, nor am I going to vote for a Repug, and I am certain the 3rd party which does get my vote will not succeed. Damned if I do, and damned if I don't.
Good points. I'm voting for the lesser evil for damage control, and working to change an imposed system were the only the alternatives are oligarchy or fascism.
Direct democracy
Anybody who lives in Alaska or any other red state, and those who live in blue states need to direct their energy to issues other than national elections since national election outcomes are determined by swing state voters, not red state or blue state voters.
Is there even one CD reader who believes the GOP won't get Alaska's 3 electoral votes in 2012 ?
Who's the lesser evil? The candidate who says we need to eliminate social programs or the one who says we need to preserve them, then works to eliminate them?
The vote is signaling your consent to being governed by the receiver of your vote. Would you rather give consent to the self-professed eliminator of our general welfare, or impeach the betrayer of our general welfare, who had received our earlier consent? How do we signal our dissent against this Tweedle-Dee/Tweedle-Dum con job?
Corporate Republican, Corporate Democrat, Unelectable Independent: Political Three Card Monte
"I am certain the 3rd party which does get my vote will not succeed."
Well it will if enough folks vote for it ....
The writer and many of the commenters act as if the world is now what the world was then. It is not and cannot be. The entire position and all that follows is meaningless...and racist.
The Truth of the matter is that Bin Laden is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams, Fear has made us turn the knife into ourselves. These laws, these utterances emanate from a poisoned political nexus and a Congress that does not represent the people.
OBAMA 2012!
Obama 1215!
If you're going to reverse the Magna Carta you may as well just stop it from ever being written.
Too true!
I worked hard on the Obama campaign because he promised us "change we could believe in". When early in his administration he appointed, as fixers of the economy, the very people who broke it --Geithner and Summers-- I registered in March of 2010 in the Green Party, rather than drop out. True, when I vote for their nominee this fall she will not win, but I will have the satisfaction of telling the establishment how I feel and in a small way will be strengthening a party that does not accept corporate money and that speaks to other issues that move me. I encourage all who feel as I do to pick up a Green ballot this March.
Yup!
Obama's racial darkness is of no concern, but his personal darkness is of great concern. He is a death token.
Conor, there is one thing you need to remember when it comes to your last paragraph. You can't have a global war on terror unless you have a ready supply of so called terrorists. That is the whole essence behind America's so called global war on terror. It is nothing more than just another way of perpetuating the Military, Congressional, Industrial Complex. All of these media whores and politicians point their fingers and scream watch out for those terrorists. Someone should explain to them that they are pointing into a mirror! Here's to the two people who are doing the work that our compliant main stream media is suppose to be doing, Julian Assange and Pvt. Bradley Manning!
The dumbest people by far are those who believe that Obama is a progressive president when it is obvious that he is a corrupt corporate democrat.
Andrew Sullivan's "conversation-changing defense" of President Obama in Newsweek advances the narrative that the Democratic Party's neoliberal centrists will likely be pressing hard this fall, regardless who the GOP candidate is.
Barack Obama wants to be judged by his actions and results over the long term - according to Sullivan, Obama has a "long game", the brilliant tactical wisdom of which his misinformed, often deranged critics on both extreme right and extreme left of the political spectrum simply fail to apprehend. Barack held out the hand of bipartisan friendship to the neocon Republican establishment, and stoically allowed it to be repeatedly bitten not because he was weak, or a triangulator, or a closet militarist, or a tool of monied corporate interests.
The President did so because he is a wise, patient and clever statesman, exposing the Repugs as obstructionists over time, trusting that the American people would reward his decency and efforts to build a moderate national consensus with a second term. This was the "long game" plan. Even if it meant giving the Bush legacy a pass on accountability for torture, illegal domestic wiretapping by NSA, wrecking the economy, and crony corruption on a massive scale, Obama governed as he has so that in the next four years he can deliver on the rest of his social justice agenda.
Well, that's the script anyway. Friedersdorf is right when he says this narrative does not explain why restoring respect for the rule of law somehow got lost in the shuffle. Anti-Americanism is now higher in much of the Middle East and elsewhere than when Bush left office because of the drone campaign backlash. Whacking Osama bin Laden is not the sort of signature credential one might expect from a Nobel laureate. Many voters are now as angry at the White House as they are at Wall Street and as they were in 2008 at the disgraced Bush/Cheney neocons.
If Sullivan is giving us an insider's preview of this fall's reelection strategy, Barack Obama's long game plan may be too smart by half.
Bill from Saginaw