Rich Lowry, National Review, Friday:
Barack Obama has perfected a three-step maneuver that could never even be attempted by a politician lacking his rhetorical skill or cool cynicism.
First: Denounce your presidential predecessor for a given policy, energizing your party's base and capitalizing on his abiding unpopularity. Second: Pretend to have reversed that policy upon taking office with a symbolic act or high-profile statement. Third: Adopt a version of that same policy, knowing that it's the only way to govern responsibly or believing that doing otherwise is too difficult.
Dick Cheney, Sunday, with the incomparably reverent and vapid John King of CNN:
KING (to Cheney): Well, since taking office, President Obama has done these things to change the policies you helped put in place. He has announced he will close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He has announced he will close CIA black sites around the world, where they interrogate terror suspects. Says he will make CIA interrogators abide by the Army Field Manual, defined waterboarding as torture and ban it, suspend trials for terrorists by military commission, and now eliminate the label of enemy combatants.
I'd like to just simply ask you, yes or no, by taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?
CHENEY: I do. I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11. I think that's a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.
President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack. . . .
Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It's not a law enforcement problem. . . .When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.
Virtually from the first day Obama was inaugurated, right-wing polemicists have been alternatively accusing him of (a) radically reversing Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, thereby ensuring that we're all about to be slaughtered by the Terrorists (see Cheney); and (b) fully embracing the Right's Terrorism approach, thereby vindicating the Bush administration's policies and exposing civil liberties criticisms of Bush as hysterical, disingenuous and wrong (see Lowry). That these two accusations are exact opposites -- mutually exclusive -- doesn't seem to bother them at all. Like a patient suffering from acute multiple personality disorder, the Right one minute accuses Obama of being a radical Leftist who wants to cuddle with Terrorists and the next minute accuses him of being Dick Cheney, Jr., eager to torture and detain everyone in sight.
If the last eight years have taught anything, it is that no rational person would listen to or take seriously anything Dick Cheney and his Lowry-like followers have to say. That they're motivated by everything other than the truth when criticizing Obama only bolsters that conclusion. But their ill motives and unbroken history of deceit doesn't mean that they're wrong in this case. And as much as one might prefer not to acknowledge it, it is becoming undeniably clear that -- at least in the realm of civil liberties, executive power and core Constitutional rights -- Lowry's description of Obama's "three-step maneuver" is basically accurate, and Cheney's fear-mongering lament that Obama is undoing his Terrorism policies is basically false.
* * * * *
Consider three key episodes from the last week just standing alone. On Friday, the Obama administration announced that it would no longer use the Bush-identified label "enemy combatants" as a ground for detaining Terrorist suspects, an announcement that generated headlines suggesting a significant change from the prior administration. But the following day, after reviewing the legal brief the administration filed (.pdf) setting forth its actual position regarding presidential powers of detention, here is how The New York Times's William Glaberson accurately described what was really done:
The Obama administration said Friday that it would abandon the Bush administration's term "enemy combatant" as it argues in court for the continued detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies.
But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.
Bush's asserted power to detain as "enemy combatants" even those people who were detained outside of a traditional "battlefield" -- rather than charge them with crimes -- was one of the most controversial of the last eight years. Yet the Obama administration, when called upon to state their position, makes only the most cosmetic and inconsequential changes -- designed to generate headlines misleadingly depicting a significant reversal ("Obama drops 'enemy combatant' label") -- while, in fact, retaining the crux of Bush's extremist detention theory.
