In a piece on drone usage in 2009, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer framed the program as “a radically new use of state-sanctioned lethal force” with “no visible system of accountability.”
She employed the ancient opinionated reporter’s trick of laundering her views through like-minded experts who called the drones “horrifying” and worthy of “abhorrence” and said the program raises “deep ethical concerns” and “exposes American leaders and Americans overseas.”
Quite a different take on Obama’s drone usage appeared on The New Yorker’s website last month. The author was, again, Mayer. But this time she refracted her opinions of Obama’s overseas actions through her hatred of George W. Bush, whose anti-terror policies Obama mostly continued and in some cases (like the drones) expanded.
This time Mayer (as Reason editor Matt Welch pointed out on the magazine’s blog) praised Obama for “asking the right questions,” for his “anguish,” for “leading the national debate,” for his “sophisticated and nuanced moral theory,” and for his “evident pain over the program.”
She chastised Bush for the “astonishingly radical theory that, as commander in chief, a president couldn’t be limited by domestic or international law . . . the Geneva Conventions became optional, cast aside as ‘quaint.’ ”
Wait a minute: Didn’t Nobel Laureate Obama wipe his feet on the Geneva Conventions, too?
Yes, in reality — but not in theory! “Obama embraced both constitutional and international legal limits, at least in principle,” Mayer wrote, “even as he struggled to define them in practice.”
Remember when Richard Nixon said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal?” When this president does it, but at least agonizes over it, it’s not illegal or even immoral.
Be reassured, pacifists and soul-searching intellectuals: Obama feels your pain, even as he rains the hurt on unarmed civilians, children and American citizens in the pursuit of international terrorists.
Bush didn’t actually kill people using drones (at least as far as we know). But he did swagger and smirk and sound like a guy rounding up a posse rather than an intellectual who tells people that he reads Reinhold Niebuhr.
Principled liberals (such as The Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald) call out Obama for failing to live up to liberal ideals. The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill called Obama’s just-war speech “a rebranding of the Bush era policies with some legalese . . . effectively, Obama has declared the world a battlefield and reserves the right to drone bomb countries in pursuit of people against whom we have no direct evidence or who we’re not seeking any indictment against.”
But mostly the left gives Obama ethical carte blanche. And yet it’s the left that is forever claiming that “hypocrisy” (not immorality or sexual fidelity) is the reason conservative pols like Mark Sanford are unfit for office. (Similar scandals that ensnare Democrats, like the Bill Clinton horndog follies, are “just about sex,” though, hence none of our business).
Applying the hypocrisy standard consistently, liberals ought to excoriate Obama on drone killings but give Bush a pass because at least he truly believed in the rightness of what he was doing.
Liberal MSNBC host Krystal Ball of “The Cycle” said the difference is that Obama is a “fundamentally responsible actor” while Bush “displayed extraordinary lapses in judgment.”
How can one man have bad judgment and the other be responsible when they looked at the similar evidence and made the same kinds of calls for the same reason — that decimating al Qaeda is too important to worry much about collateral damage?
The liberal argument is circular: We know Bush’s decisions were bad because Bush made them. Ball actually compared Bush talking about just war to Larry Flynt talking about women and body image.
Another MSNBC pundit, Touré, dismissed the many civilians and children and at least four Americans who were killed in overseas drone strikes by saying, “Al Qaeda attacked this nation. We are attacking al Qaeda back.” On Twitter he added, “He’s the commander in chief.” Touré is, of course, strongly opposed to capital punishment. Executing Americans after a public trial and years of appeals? Wrong. Executing Americans by zapping them from the sky based on secret evidence? Fine.
When Obama was saying, “I am not in favor of gay marriage,” as he did in 2008, that was OK with liberals because they knew that (unlike Bush when he said the same thing) he didn’t really mean it: He was a hypocrite who had said back in 1996 that he backed marriage equality. Hurrah for hypocrites! Liberal hypocrites, anyway.
Liberals love Obama’s story, love the way he looks, love the way he speaks. His policies? Disposable. A poll conducted by YouGov last August asked liberals what they thought of targeted drone strikes: They weren’t in favor. But when told Obama was conducting such strikes, support jumped hugely.
When liberals rhapsodize about Obama’s alleged thoughtfulness, his cosmopolitanism, the books he reads and the culture he admires — then dismiss his actual policies with a shrug — it’s easy to suspect his fans admire him primarily because he reminds them of the image they have of themselves, which is also the opposite of George W. Bush.
A favorite word liberals forever attach to Obama is “sophisticated.” Blindly backing those who remind you of yourself is anything but that, though. It’s base, atavistic, knee-jerk, primal.
kyle.smith@nypost.com