More Blackmail on National Security

Image via Wikipedia

So, was Obama the campaigner a liar, or simply naive? I’m having a hard time thinking of a third possibility for Obama’s backtracking on closing Quantanamo (and his supporters’ sudden appreciation for the nuances of security versus liberty), which Michelle Malkin covers in her column this week.

Funny, when President Bush and his homeland security team realized these very realities seven years ago, they were branded terrorists and hounded relentlessly by Congress, the media, and the Left. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey eloquently defended these administration’s counter-terrorism policies at the Federalist Society before he collapsed, he was heckled as a “tyrant.” And when I wrote my second book expounding on this very thesis, I was branded a racist and fascist whose ideas exploring the proper balance between security and civil liberties had no place in public discourse.

Now, at long last, some liberals have realized that the sacred goal of “regain[ing] America’s moral stature in the world,” as Obama put it, may be less important than ensuring that al Qaeda killers don’t strike on American ground again.

Most conservatives I’ve read on the web on this topic recognize Obama’s reversals and are grateful for them. Obama’s supporters, on the other hand — with the exception of those on the far left — will act as if he’d been saying this all along.

This is more of the blackmail that Ace identified last week:

No one on the right is exactly crying that Obama has suddenly discovered missile defense might be worth keeping, or that terrorists shouldn’t be let out of war prisoner camps during the midst of the war they were captured in, or etc., etc., etc.

No, the complaint is this: The left plays a game of national security blackmail with the country over such issues. If the right takes actions which they themselves admit are necessary (Clinton conducted extraordinary renditions, for example), they agitate constantly and stridently to end the practice.

If and only if someone of the left is elected president do such actions become legitimate again.

Thus the blackmail: Elect us into high office or we will resist, undermine, prevent, and block actions necessary to safeguard the US.

It’s one thing to take such opposition-just-to-oppose with lesser matters. But with national security? Unacceptable.

I am one of those that is happy to see these reversals. And it will be fun to see the ultra-lefties seethe over them. But the Orwellian reversals in the media and among high profile “mainstream” supporters is, and will continue to be, disgusting.