The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (12/6/09) thinks there’s something wrong with left-wing critics of Barack Obama. As his lead put it:
Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.
Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he’d withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama’s critics–maybe even Michael Moore–are aware of that. Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?
Maybe that’d be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it, Obama is an “incrementalist…. His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy.” Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.
Milbank closes with this:
You’d think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they’re using words such as “O’Bomber” to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy “puts into question his whole leadership.”
Moveon’s petition is not “against the policy”–their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress “to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline.”
Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they’re still against is a sign of their consistency. Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war “thoughtful,” but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it.
Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama’s decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank’s point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama’s position. That’s obviously true–and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.
I think it should be obvious that MoveOn serves Obamade at every meeting, shouldn’t it?
As for Code Pink – am I wrong in saying that they pretty much ignored “the good war” (and the people dying due to it) for years, focusing almost exclusively on Iraq? That was pretty much the MO of most “anti-war” groups, wasn’t it?
And it’s funny how they all get it that Iraq was primarily about oil, and yet the idea that Afghanistan is largely about pipelines has next to no currency on “the left” – whatever the hell that is.
Re: Dana Millbank’s peculiar reasoning about Obama’s “thoughtful” war decision-making:
I wonder if the next Afghan or Pakistani child to have his or her limbs blown off by one of our remote controlled missiles will say: “Whew, at least that came from a man who has a “pragmatic, non-ideological strategy.””
I wish that all these people who are demonizing Obama every time he does something that they don’t agree with, would please offer their idea of a solution to Afghanistan. Its easy to sit back and bitch, but its much harder to offer workable suggestions. Also, before they offer suggestions, they need to get all the inside info on the real conditions on the ground. Many Afghanis want our troops to stay, they are afraid of the Taliban, and we are their only protection. The Bush admin. got us into this mess, and there are NO good solutions.
LIBERALS, and Obama?
I had a hard time following FAIR’s article (sorry FAIR; but I love you guys)..
See if you all can follow this:
Liberals are not happy with Obama.. And I dont mean liberals in the sense of “anyone who is not a far RR republican.” Rather I mean atual liberals (not happy at all)..
We liberals helped elect Obama mainly out of fear (fear of getting a corporate puppet into the white house.. IE: a more controllable puppet than Obama at least)..
Now the fear is Obama will be another Bill Clinton; doing conservative things (although not so extreme as the far right), but being hated by the right for six degrees of seperation from the right..
The problem liberals have is because there are much more than 6 degrees of seperation..
Example: health care is now screwed up; making single payer the “catch all” that will catch the desperate poor and more expensive cases his corporate partners dont want to have to pay for (translated; we taxpayers will help out the CEO’s already making billions; because they collect money for coverage, but turn expensive cases over to us to pay for)..
bobbler
To Regina, a lot of people “demonizing Obama” (and I would say demonizing is a stretch, “criticizing”is much more accurate), HAVE offered their idea of a “solution” in Afghanistan. The solution is to begin to withdraw and leave as quickly as is logistically possible. Will what happens after that be good? No, but things have not been “good” in Afghanistan in a long time, and the U.S. military isn’t going to change that anymore than the Soviets did or the British before them. There are no good options in Afghanistan (on that we agree), but recognizing that and taking the least bad one (extricating ourselves from a quagmire) is the approach that makes the most sense. There are a lot of very smart people who feel that way, and saying that all they are doing is “sitting back and bitching” suggests that you are not even remotely engaged with the relevant arguments (if you want a quick primer, the documentary “Rethinking Afghanistan” does a good job summarizing some of the key anti-war arguments, and includes thoughts from a lot of people who know what they are talking about).
Finally a lot of folks who oppose Obama’s policies (including me, for what it’s worth) are fairly aware of the “real conditions on the ground,” certainly to the point where they know that citizens of Afghanistan are called “Afghans,” not “Afghanis.” Perhaps you are the one who needs to do a little less bitching and little more reading.
Are any of you old enough to remember President Eisenhower’s warning about the danger of the “Military Industrial {Congrssional} complex. Of course the Congressional reference was left out of the “sanitized” version.
But we’ve been getting deeper an deeper into “wars” foisted upon us by the Executive. If you have ever read your United States Constitution, you’ll see that ONLY the Legislative branch (Congress) can declare war. When was the last time Congress declared war? WWII.