The left accepts in Obama all they screamed against before.
5/6/2011, "The First-Person Presidency," NRO, Victor Davis Hanson
"President Obama takes credit for operations that
- would have been impossible
- had Senator Obama’s views prevailed."
"Senator Obama complained about airborne attacks on the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. President Obama increased Predator assassination attacks fivefold.
- four times as many terrorist suspects by Predators in 27 months
- than did President Bush in eight years.
In January 2007 — three weeks after President Bush announced the surge — Senator Obama introduced the “Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007.” If it had passed, that law would have removed all troops from Iraq by March 2008. Obama derided the surge in unequivocal terms both before and after its implementation: “I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.” “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.”
Candidate Obama criticized warrantless wiretaps, in accusing the Bush administration in the harshest terms: “This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.” A disinterested examination of present policy regarding both wiretaps and intercepts would show no change from the Bush administration, or
- indeed considerable expansion of the use of these tools....
“I taught constitutional law for ten years at the University of Chicago, so . . . um . . . your next president will actually believe in the Constitution, which you can’t say about your current president.” George Bush did not believe in the U.S. Constitution?
In sum, Senator Obama opposed
- tribunals,
- renditions,
- Guantanamo,
- preventive detention,
- Predator-drone attacks,
- the Iraq War,
- wiretaps, and
- intercepts —
before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to
- embracing targeted assassinations,
- new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and
- a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation--
The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has
- simply been airbrushed away.
Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush....
Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that
- would have been impossible had his own views prevailed."
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