The hypocrisy of professional liberals keeps growing

By that I mean the left wing of our political class and their hangers-on in the media (a group which constitutes most of the MSM, which is why the Left is now preparing to try to destroy all other forms of media).  As the Anchoress sums it up,

Seems increasingly like all the “Fascist Bush” caterwauling was the usual fake, dishonest theater meant as a means to an end—the end being to destroy the hated “election stealer” and his legacy, and not much more.But you know, for someone who “did everything wrong,” his policies suddenly seem wise and right to some surprising people. . . .So, the FISA stays, Gitmo (despite all the righteous-sounding rhetoric) is not so bad, after all. Terrorist-suspected detainees do not enjoy constitutional rights, after all. Patriot Act, stays. Whether succeeding presidents will abuse the powers Bush put in place to protect us is rather less a question than a surety. Not an “if” but a “when.” And that is troubling, oh yes.

Read the whole thing; as usual, she has a lot of links to some very interesting things.  The interesting thing to me about all this is that the hypocrisy she decries is, as I said in the title, that of professional liberals—by which I do not mean liberals who are professionals, but rather people who earn their money by being liberal and representing liberal positions in some way.  What we’re seeing here on the part of those folks is the betrayal of a lot of liberal positions and a lot of liberal beliefs—not all, by any means, but a fair number of them—and all the strongly-worded unequivocal promises Barack Obama offered to go with them.Now, from my point of view, there are real benefits to that.  One, as a foreign-policy realist, I believe that our country will be the safer for it; the chances of a nightmare scenario are much lower than they would be had President Obama actually kept the promises made by Candidate Obama.  Two, this will help (and indeed, seems to be already helping) rehabilitate President Bush, because it is in effect an admission by many of his loudest critics that they were wrong; not just for history but even in this era, folks are unlikely to be able to argue with any credibility that President Bush was bad for doing things that President Obama was good for doing.The interesting question to me in all this is, will the vast majority of American liberals sell out on this the way that the vast majority of American conservatives sold out on other issues during the last eight years?  Doug Hagler has argued repeatedly in comments on this blog that there effectively is no conservative party in our economic policy; he’s been absolutely right about that because the conservative core of the GOP essentially sold out those issues (and others) in order to support the president on the GWOT and judicial nominees.  The result, ultimately, was electoral catastrophe for the party.  Some folks are now arguing that conservative Republicans should have gone into opposition years ago in order to preserve their own integrity and avoid being lumped in with the GOP Establishment types who were setting so much of the government’s policy (and doing so quite poorly).It is, of course, too early to argue that liberals in this country should do the same with respect to the Obama administration; I’m not even sure there’s a good case that conservatives should have done so, though I agree that at the very least, there should have been some strong conservative challenges to some of the Bush administration’s policies.  It’s too early to predict whether blind adherence by the Left to the Obama administration will end as badly as the Right’s blind adherence to the Bush administration did.  But it isn’t too early to predict that if the liberal movement makes the same mistake in the coming years as the conservative movement did in the years just past, they will likely come to the end of this administration feeling the same way the conservative movement has been feeling:  like they’ve lost their soul.Remember, put not your trust in princes.  No matter how often you kiss them, they’re all still frogs at heart.