In the aftermath of 9/11 when every politician on either side of the political aisle was drunkenly falling over themselves to see who could out macho the other and pass legislation even more outlandish and freedom restricting than the last, I had a conversation with a particularly conservative friend if mine. She stated, between sips of her extra fiery Bloody Mary, that she felt uncomfortable with some of the powers that were being given to the executive branch under the newly christened Patriot Act and wondered what my thoughts were. I agreed with her and told her that the best way for her to look at any grant of Presidential authority was to ask herself if she would be comfortable giving that power to Bill Clinton, and if she wasn't then it probably wasn't a good idea to give it to Bush, either.
That conversation seems particularly poignant to me now since I see those on the left repeatedly giving the Obama administration a pass as they grab more and more power for themselves at the expense of our freedom and the rule of law.
Just this week we saw the latest in an ongoing saga of stupid decisions on which the left continues to give Obama a pass. When the President invoked Executive Privilege in an attempt to avoid turning over subpoenaed Department of Justice documents my head hit my desk for about the hundredth time. But sure enough there was Democrat after Democrat lining up on this, that, and the other network news show to defend the President's misguided decision. And apparently none of them saw the irony.
Add this to the continued and expanded powers of indefinite detention which now apply to US citizens on US soil, the expanded drone program, the redefining of enemy combatant to include any male of fighting age who happens to be in the area of a drone strike in order to reduce reports of civilian casualties, a program of assassination of not only foreign enemies but US citizens the President himself deems worthy of being killed, and on, and on, and on, you start getting the idea that those on the left are simply willing to let the President do anything as long as he or she is someone for whom they voted.
Take the invoking of Executive Privilege for instance. I would have hoped for at least one elected person in the Democratic Party to have stood up and criticized the President for choosing very tenuous exercise of an extraordinary legal privilege in order to stymie a Congressional investigation into a legitimate subject of Congressional inquiry. The same elected officials who came to this President's defense were decrying GWB's use of this privilege in blocking the investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, even though Bush's decision, while still improper, was a more legitimate exercise of Executive Privilege than Obama's.
The more we allow this President to expand on the power grabs given to the previous administration without criticism, the more we are ceding our rights to an ever more powerful executive at the cost of our own freedom, and the more we lose any credibility we have to criticize any expansion of governmental power by this or any future administration.
I have no problem with anyone who likes Obama or wants to vote for him because of the many good policies he has implemented. But just because you like his stand on health care, or gay rights, or immigration, doesn't mean you have to sit idly by while he sets fire to Constitution on everything else.
This is why I have such great admiration for people like reporter and author Chris Hedges or Icelandic Parliamentarian Brigitta Jonsdöttir who are two of the Plaintiffs in the groundbreaking lawsuit challenging the Obama administration on the indefinite detention powers granted under NDAA. By refusing to stay silent on a matter of such incredible importance to our basic liberties as Americans, they were able to expose the utter baselessness of the government's justifications for such expanded powers. They won a preliminary injunction against the government using indefinite detention under the NDAA.
The list of actions that I set forth above would have liberals taking to the streets in droves had the Bush administration even thought of implementing them. So, I ask to my liberal brethren the same thing I asked to my conservative friend ten years ago, would you feel comfortable granting these powers to Bush? If the answer is no, as I am sure if you are honest it is, then stand up and offer the same criticism to Obama.
If you won't, then you have already lost.
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