Two pieces, by Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, on Obama’s policy of torturing human beings for whatever an American president’s ends may be, without limitation. The national malaise continues – how much sadness I see in people’s lives! even people a decade younger than myself are locked in it – and Obama’s practicality (i.e., lack of principle) seems less and less like the thing we need.
In some kind of instant-karma universe – which we do not have – Obama would lose the next election to Sarah Palin, and he and all his lawyers would spend the next decade locked in dark boxes, suffering all the things they have legitimated. But I imagine it will be some far more nameless people who will suffer for this.
In the Catholic wedding service, one of the concluding prayers is that the poor – the nameless ones whose lives are altered by presidential powers far more than ours – deign to receive us in heaven, for the power will be theirs there, and no longer ours. May we pass such a test.
And as far as the world goes, it is good to remember that there is absolutely no guarantee that res politicae will go well, in this country or any other. Infusion of principle is continually necessary, for such is the blood of the body politic.
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While I agree “in principle” about this, I think it’s a narrow viewpoint, allowed only to those writers because they don’t have to make any decisions. Obama has x dollars of political capital, x amount of time, which must be spent of things that can be accomplished in a particular priority and order.
If he hadn’t gotten much accomplished in under two years, I might agree with the idea that his practicality is needed “less and less”. But he has accomplished so much. In fact, if Obama gets through the next 6 years without another war in the Middle East, I would say his presidency is a huge success: health care reform started, wall street reform started, additional war avoided.
Greenwald’s armchair quarterbacking always strikes me as useful, and as good journalism, but never as the words of one who has *done* anything.
Well, Greenwald gave us a very succinct summary of the left’s criticism of Obama:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/17/obama/index.html
Which to me does seem justified.
Though of course, no one is more of an armchair quarterback than yours truly, and no one gets less done. Purity and accomplishment are not bedfellows.