I've been waiting for the unhinged Left to call for Obama to resign/be impeached. The TOTUS has done plenty to enrage both Right and Left; his staggeringly expensive "stimulus" bill, ordering the closing of Guantanamo Bay (and flip-flop thereon), his handling (or not) of North Korea, his extreme and urgent call for rushing through a myriad of huge changes to the American economy (from cap and trade to car emissions to capping executive compensation to health care "reform"), and the controversial release of certain memos (and the redacting of same). So, it's with a little amusement that I read this column by Ted Rall, wherein he froths at the mouth that Obama should resign.
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.
Oh, dear. When an Alinsky-ite like Obama pisses off Ted Rall, what is left for him? This will surely provide cover for certain critics to argue about Obama's "centrist" leanings (a load of what Dana calls "bovine feces" if there ever was one), but such political machinations are nothing of the sort. Obama feels free to stretch the influence of the federal government in all sorts of new directions when he has the opportunity. The only place Obama feels any tugs to the right is in the area of national security, where he knows his left-leaning rhetoric of the campaign is unrealistic and dangerous in a world filled with people who can and will fly airplanes into American office buildings just to kill a lot of civilians.
But for Rall, that is precisely the problem. Rall is furious about Obama's proposed "preventive detentions."
In practice, Obama wants to let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying off the street.
Well, that's not quite true. The government might force you into bankruptcy and give away your assets, but I don't believe we're headed for jack-booted thugs banging on your door.
Admittedly, if the feds were to go around rounding up American citizens and disappearing them (as leftwingers hysterically accused the Bush administration of desiring to do, but showing no evidence of same), I would probably be more alarmed. But that's not what Obama is talking about. He's actually trying to figure out what to do with the dangerous criminals rounded up in Iraq and Afghanistan who can't be released but can't be charged, either (see the Uighurs for the most pressing example).
In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that people against whom there is a “lack of evidence” are innocent. They walk free. In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power, “tainted evidence” is no evidence at all. If you can’t prove that a defendant committed a crime — an actual crime, not a thoughtcrime — in a fair trial, you release him and apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.
Rall's naive and law enforcement approach to terrorism is what got us here in the first place. The problem with law enforcement is that it typically swings into effect only after a crime is committed, not before. Even Obama realizes that sacrificing American lives because we want to wait for terrorists to incinerate us is an unacceptable risk, either politically or morally. Rall may be more concerned about the rights of the accused terrorist, but most of us (even Barack Obama) recognize that preventing another 9/11 is more important than allowing thugs caught on the field of battle to be freed to attack us again.
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