Truest statement of the week

Barack Obama did win in 2008 running on a platform more liberal than the one he has pursued in the interim. Perhaps he couldn't move any farther left on immigration or health care and stay viable. But on national security, executive power, and civil-liberties issues, he campaigned and won handily repudiating Bush-era policies, only to govern to the "right" of the Bush Administration.
There wasn't a political imperative to do so. And I'm tired of that truth being obscured.
If liberals are going express horror at the GOP agenda as they enthusiastically support Obama's reelection, it's time for them to own his policies and stop trying to blame them on George W. Bush, or intransigent Republicans, or the financial crisis, or corporate campaign donations, or the desire to compromise, or an electorate that wasn't ready for the allegedly "knighted" Obama.
Barack Obama wasn't pressured to be executioner-in-chief. He asserted himself as arbiter of which human beings to kill without trial, at times far from any battlefield, sometimes without even knowing their identities. He decided to limit congressional oversight and totally exclude the judiciary.
House Speaker John Boehner didn't define militants as all men of military age that American drones kill. The Obama Administration did that.
Voters didn't clamor for an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The Obama Administration decided to wage it.
An intransigent Congress didn't force the Obama Administration to make frequent use of the state-secrets privilege, or to keep Bradley Manning in solitary confinement, or to keep secret the legal memo that outlines the theory behind his extrajudicial assassination of American citizens.
No one made Obama violate the War Powers Resolution in Libya.





--  Conor Friedersdorf, "Liberals Need to Start Holding Obama Responsible for His Policies" (The Atlantic).