AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Thursday 24 June 2010

More broadly, after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, the very idea that the Presidency is a weak and largely powerless office is laughable on its face. It’s Barack Obama — not the U.S. Congress — that is detaining innocent people without trials, targeting U.S. citizens for due-process-free assassinations, secretly ordering covert wars via Special Forces, ordering a “surge” in the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan, and launching cruise missile strikes with cluster bombs in Yemen. The more honest commentators who are invoking this “weak presidency” defense on behalf of Obama — such as Matt Ygleisas, Ezra Klein, and Scott Lemieux — acknowledge its basic inapplicability to Terrorism and foreign policy, which accounts for a substantial part of the liberal critique of the Obama presidency. And, for that matter, many of the positive steps Obama has taken — changes in drug policy, an improvement in tone with the Muslim world, release of the OLC torture memos — were also actions taken unilaterally using the power of the Presidency. Glenn Greenwald

7 notes

  1. paulpearl reblogged this from azspot
  2. azspot posted this

A GNT creation ©2007–2012