Meet the New Boss
Poor liberals, they have to wake up heartbroken every Saturday morning. That is no way to start your weekend!
On May 10 I wrote about a pattern I was seeing with the Obama administration,
“The only time of the week worth paying attention is on Friday nights. Why? It’s PR Rule #1, when you have news your trying to bury….release it on a Friday night.” What news was he dribbling out? Just his reversal on military detainees, that’s all. After all he said lambasting the Bush administrations policy, who could blame Obama for trying to hide the fact that he was now adopted those very positions? He may be Mr. Transparency and Open Governement, but he is also pretty adept at hiding the difference between his words and deeds.
What heartache are his liberal supporters waking up to this week?
Andrew McCarthy at National Review has the background,
The Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, received terrorist training at al Qaeda affiliated camps (from an organization formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law) and were captured after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are the Left’s combatant cause célèbre. The military took the incoherent position that they were trained al Qaeda terrorists but that their real beef was with China, not us. Thus, the federal courts have held that they are not enemy combatants. The government has been trying to relocate them for years but no country will take the remaining 17 — other than China, where our treaty obligations arguably forbid us from sending them because there is reason to believe they’d be persecuted.
So, how did the Obama administration go about restoring our reputation in the world? By once again adopting the Bush administration’s policies, from SCOTUS Blog,
The brief holds to the position of the Bush Administration that a court’s power to issue a remedy in a habeas case — even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s mandate last year that the detainees have a constitutional right to seek their freedom — is limited to a finding of eligibility for release, without an actual release from captivity while diplomatic negotiations to resettle a prisoner continue. The brief seeks to draw a clear distinction between “simple release†and “release into the U.S.â€
The filing also clearly embraces the Bush Administration view that detainees cleared for release may be held for a “wind-up†period of indefinite duration, while resettlement efforts proceed. The brief does not specify how long such a period could last, saying only that it would be “a reasonable period of time.†But it cites examples from past history suggesting that it could run for “several years.â€
As I said on May 10,
Maybe, just maybe, the previous administration put into place an agggressive series of measures that were carefully considered in order to protect the United States? What other conclusion can you reach if so many of them are suddenly acceptable to our new president?
If you are a liberal Obama supporter you must be one of two things this morning, either heartbroken or a hypocrite. After all, how could they support the second coming of George W. Bush?
Clive Crook writes in the Financial Times that it is time for Obama to apologize, to his supporters, and President Bush,
..he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.
Sounds like a good idea to me, what do you think?