Dissecting the arguments of liberal apologists for Obama's surveillance and secret war

[fluffitfluffit]

But all congress can do is pass laws.

oy

[Ratel]

Democratic party partisans like Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley spent the Bush years condemning the tactics they now defend under Obama – apart from sheer intellectual dishonesty, how can this be explained?

I like to think of myself as significantly politically aware, very liberal, and strongly Democratic. I’ve never heard the names Sean Wilentz or George Packer in my life. I guess they are…influential opinion-shapers…somewhere?

Meanwhile Michael Kinsley went from The New Republic (yay Iraq War!), William Buckley’s Firing Line, The Washington Post and then Slate. I don’t see that making him liberal, but is does give him a fair claim to being the trolley King of the Underworld.

Not that it isn’t stupid to be a liberal apologist for the police state, or that they don’t exist, but being stupid doesn’t automatically qualify you as being a liberal.

[FoolishOwl]

WHY DO national-security liberals have such a hard time thinking straight about Greenwald, Snowden and the politics of leaks? One reason is sheer laziness. National-security liberals have always defined themselves against their antagonists, and especially their left-wing antagonists. They have seen themselves as the decent Left, willing to deploy American power to make the world a happier place, and fighting the good fight against the knee-jerk anti-Americans.

There’s the problem. The extension of US power is morally indefensible, and they’re committed to defending it.

It’s noteworthy that Thoreau comes up for opprobrium. Henry David Thoreau’s essay, On Civil Disobedience, was written, after all, about Thoreau’s imprisonment for refusing to pay taxes that were meant to support the US invasion of Mexico – a naked effort at expansion through military conquest, that also was linked to the expansion of slavery. Slavery was illegal in Mexico, and Mexico was a refuge for people escaping slavery. This was as plain an example of an unjust war as can be imagined.