Memo to Andrew Sullivan: You're Helping Obama Wage an Unscrupulous Drone War
It's time to stop ignoring the bad because of a perceived worse
Conor Friedersdorf made waves in the blogosphere when he basically pointed out to the president's supporters that their man's foreign policy has been atrocious on the human rights front and that he wouldn't be supporting Obama again.
Mitt Romney's full endorsement last night of Obama's prosecution of the drone war, lack of due process and all, prompted Andrew Sullivan to ask Friedersdorf if he thinks Romney would be "as scrupulous" (tee-hee) as Obama has been on the drone war. He added that "in a small way" Friedersdorf may be helping hand the drone war machinery the Obama administration built to a President Romney, which Friedersdorf wrote might happen
Yet Sullivan's apologism for Obama's reckless drone campaign helps in no small way to keep it politically feasible. To wit, Sullivan's trotted out the spectre of a return to the policies of Bush-Cheney and the "end of reality-based government" in America. Yet, as I noted when Sullivan first made the claim, Barack Obama's government is far from reality based itself:
[T]he president adopted much of the Bush strategy on counter-terrorism. Is torture any less connected to reality thanextrajudicial killing? Is a military commission more divorced from reality than a due process consisting of conversations?
The president doubled down in opposition to the reality-based community last night, attacking Mitt Romney for holding the same position on keeping troops in Iraq past their withdrawal date that Obama advocated as president. Romney called him out on it but the inconsistency was left unaddressed by Obama and unexplored by the debate moderator, Bob Schieffer. Obama's supporters are not interested in reality-based government, they're interested in keeping their man in office.
Apropos, from The Onion: Obama Takes Out Romney with Mid-Debate Drone Attack
Via the Drones twitter feed
