Frank Rich on the Obama = Bush comparisons

[WilliamPitt]

Q: A number of sources in the Times piece allege that essentially Obama's "war on terror" is the same as Bush's with less boneheaded stagecraft. Do you think that's accurate?

Rich: That’s a stretch. The Bush administration heedlessly practiced torture, gleefully flouted the law, and bragged of its “dead or alive” game plan — even as it let bin Laden get away and let the Taliban regroup in Afghanistan. The Bushies were not only an outlaw gang, but a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. As if that weren’t enough, they undermined national security by ginning up a war, catastrophic in length and cost, to prevent a nuclear attack from a country that had no nuclear weapons whatsoever. The focused Obama counterterrorism policy, whatever one’s criticisms of it, is not to be confused with the cornucopia of Bush misadventures and mishaps. And as for counterterrorism itself, there has been no 9/11 on Obama’s watch, knock wood. Let us not forget that there was one on Bush-Cheney’s.

The rest of the interview: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/05/frank-rich-mitts-bleach-bottle-bimbo.html

[Enrique]

1. the question you skipped over is more to the point

the "Bush=Obama" question asks about something I don't even see in the article, and the article contains all of the points Rich makes and more, pointing out the differences between Bush and Obama.

The first question is more relevant and Rich's answer is more interesting:

Q.The Times published a deeply reported story yesterday on Obama's very involved role in counterterrorism operations. You were a big critic of Bush's war on terror, how do you feel about Obama's?

A. The Times report, seemingly unassailable, offers a chilling snapshot of the president himself poring over “kill lists” of terrorists as if they were baseball cards. More chilling, perhaps, is that he does so with a surfeit of self-righteousness. “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions,” as one line in the article has it. I have nothing against aggressive counterterrorism. But almost any time an American commander in chief, however patriotic in his national-security intentions, starts to play God, fudge bedrock values by looking for lawyerly constitutional loopholes, and micromanage military targets, we get in trouble — whether it was L.B.J. and Nixon in Vietnam, or Bush’s proxy Cheney in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m glad Obama took out bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. But civilian deaths and botched missions will mint new terrorists no matter how many moles we whack. The more sunlight on what’s going on, the better. Unfortunately, since both of America’s wars have fallen off the map of public consciousness, it’s not clear how much of a ripple the Times report made beyond high-end news consumers.

[gratuitous]

2. Ooh, that's, uh, Rich

"I'm glad Obama took out . . . Anwar al-Awlaki." So glad, in fact, that I'm willing to bet that al-Awlaki's name never passed Rich's lips prior to his summary execution. But he's "glad" now about it, which sort of contradicts Rich's other statements about fudging bedrock values and suchlike.

Fudge it all you want, it's still a crime against humanity. I don't want or need a president who's going to preserve, protect and defend the United States. I want a president who preserves, protects and defends the Constitution. At this time we still have a country, and we still call it the United States, but it isn't the country described in the Constitution, with the checks and the balances and the due process and the trials and the evidence presented against the accused in open court.

[coalition_unwilling]

3. +1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 - Well put and definitely

appreciated.