George W. Obama
What were the charges?
Expanded executive power. Trampled on rights. Ruled by executive order. Creeping authoritarianism.
Does that about cover most of what the left tried to hang on the Bush presidency? And who was the answer to all those problems?
The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.
Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.
So it was never about principle, was it? It was always about politics.
Hope and change.
~McQ
[HT: tkc]
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Does that about cover most of what the left tried to hang on the Bush presidency?
It also looks like what a lot of people who are not “the left” hung on the Bush presidency. Just to be fair.
Of course it was never about principles. Take for instance:
“…claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war…”
Lincoln claimed the same exact thing. And he acted on it, by imprisoning thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial, including members of the Maryland state legislature. And those were American citizens, not violent terrorists or extremist combatants.
If you’re trying to convince lefties that their messiah is actually much like the caricature that they’ve built of George Bush over the years, forget about it. Lefties’ brains don’t work that way (if at all). They’ve drunk the kool aid; TAO could dissolve the Congress, have the justices of the Supreme Court jailed, and publicly urinate on the Constitution, but the lefties would continue to moon over how wonderful he is compared to the idiotic tyrant George Bush.
The best news here is that the Obama Administration is abandoning the use of “preventative detention” under Constitutional auspices, which he had alluded to back in May. Putting these detentions under the law of war thus limits their use.
All of a sudden, Obama finds when it comes to North Korea…and a host of other places…sitting in the Oval Office makes him look and act a lot like his predecessor no matter how much he wishes it weren’t so.
The one is bound and determined to return the failed Clinton system of pretending that the war on Islamist terrorism can be fought as if it were a criminal justice problem.
Under the laws of war, once the commander in chief determines that an individual is one, enemy and two combanant, he can determine him forever. alas the one likes to think of himself a peacetime president.