Wow . . . liberal writer takes hatchet to Barack Obama

I can’t say I’ve ever been very aware of Ted Rall, but apparently he’s a syndicated columnist and editorial cartoonist of some significance; apparently he’s also an atheist and very liberal, but apparently willing to call out Democrats if he thinks they have it coming, rather than take the party line as a straightjacket.  I think he does a remarkable job of proving that with this column (HT:  Mark Hemingway):

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now—before he drags us further into the abyss.

My oh my.  I’m not sure any conservatives have dared to cut loose with a broadside like that (and if they had, they would have been torn to shreds for it by the OSM); to read this coming from a liberal is nothing short of amazing.  But then, I think the issue that provoked him to this point is one on which liberals and conservatives should agree, and unite in opposing the White House:

I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK. . . .

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime”—contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

He’s right about that; this proposal would be exactly the sort of banana-republic behavior I’ve been worrying about (as in this post) ever since the campaign, given some of the tactics we saw from Barack Obama and his flunkies then.  In truth, the whole idea here is profoundlyilliberal, and really rather hard to explain.  Either President Obama is one of those folks who has a sneaking hidden admiration for totalitarian techniques (something more common on the Left than one would think, as we saw with Code Pink and other leftist organizations when they snuggled up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or else this is his solution to the dilemma he faces.  After all, if he’s committed to giving captured terrorists the same rights as any American, and giving them the rights Americans have now would be a threat to national security, what else is he going to do?

The question is, will people go along with it?  Not if Rall has anything to say about it, we won’t—and again, it’s hard to argue with his point:

Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Rall is here addressing the issue of terrorism, but this is in fact a much broader concern and temptation in jurisprudence, perhaps especially with regard to sexual predators—if preventive detention ever becomes a reality in the American criminal-justice system, it won’t be long before the clamor arises to have it applied to violent rapists; there are more than a few people even now who think it would be perfectly appropriate to pre-emptively imprison folks like that until they’re too frail to feed themselves.  (Science fiction plays with this theme at various points; the apotheosis of this would of course be Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” and the 2002 film based on it, with his concept of the “Precrime” unit that identifies and arrests criminals before they commit their crimes.)

All of this leads Rall to a remarkably strong statement:

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

Now, the conclusion that President Bush was a terrible leader is Rall’s, not mine; I don’t happen to think he was.  I do, however, think that all too many Republicans fell into line behind him when we shouldn’t have out of political calculation (calculation which, ultimately, proved incorrect, as that behavior turned out to be unwise politically as well as philosophically).  I also don’t think it correct or fair to call President Obama “a monster”—that’s hysterical hyperbole of the worst sort.

The man’s a politician, nothing more and nothing less—though to be specific, he’s a Chicago politician, which is about the most cynical and manipulative sort our country has—and if there’s “something rotten inside him,” well, there’s something rotten inside each and every one of us.  Traditionally, it’s called sin, though I would imagine that as an atheist, Rall doesn’t think he’s supposed to believe in it.  And yet, it’s there all the same, in Barack Obama no less than in anyone else.

And that, I suspect, is the reason for Rall’s harshness in going after the president:  Barack Obama was supposed to be better, and so far (and here I agree with Rall completely) he’s been worse.  What you hear in this scream of rage is, I think, the anguished fury of severe disillusionment, as it has become apparent that Candidate Obama played the Left the same way he played everyone else.  Such political principles and impulses as he has are hard-left, that much is clear, but (as with Bill Clinton) they are secondary to the main goal of gaining, maintaining, and extending power.  If it suits his particular sort of Realpolitik to keep his promises, then he’ll keep them; if it doesn’t, he won’t; and if he can duck responsibility for not keeping them, or keeping them, or (if most advantageous) for addressing an issue at all, he’ll do that, too.

The political lesson of Ted Rall’s column (apart from its message) is this:  the true believers aren’t going to stand for that very long.  E. J. Dionne, in recognizing (and celebrating!) the fact that President Obama and his administration have been quite deliberately selling different stories to different ideological groups as a tactic for advancing his agenda and isolating conservatives, worried a little that the president might overreach, and that it might not ultimately work:

But establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.

Dionne is correct in his concerns; and given the case of Ted Rall, I suspect that this approach ultimately won’t work, that the president will find that his mastery is ultimately too limited to pull off what he’s attempting.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

—Abraham Lincoln (attributed)