Conor Friedersdorf Nails it

Last updated on: December 28, 2014 at 7:47 pm by Mark Shea

Conor Friedersdorf Nails it 2014-12-28T19:47:00-07:00 Mark Shea

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“But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American; 2) covered up torture; 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations; 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes; 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so); 6) let high-ranking national-security officials break the law with impunity; and 7) persecuted whistleblowers—confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in 10 Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. “

If Americans are true to form in off year elections, they will hand the GOP a victory today to register their well-earned disapproval of Obama. Then the Bourbon Republicans will, true to their form, learn all the wrong lessons from that.

Freidersdorf’s bill of indictment is the real substance of what is wrong with this Administration. But the Boy Who Cries Wolf Right Wing Noise Machine has not focused there and and has often deliberately covered much of this up since they *like* many of the crimes Obama has committed. Instead, it gins up hysteria and creates panics about junk like Lattegate or You Didn’t Build That or flat out lies that he insulted Stay at Home Moms (He didn’t: he said that women who stay home to raise their kids should not get screwed out of higher earnings over their lifetime as a result). A right wing political culture that rules by ginning up panics is not a serious political culture. And we have paid for it twice by nominating insubstantial candidates who could not even defeat *this* guy.

I suspect we will pay for it again in 2016 since there seems to be little perception of right and wrong in critiques of Obama, merely of winning and losing. On the other hand, if you dumb political culture down enough on both sides of the aisle, you might wind up electing somebody so unexpectedly awful that people might wind up being forced to contemplate the fact that a democracy generally gets the government it deserves. You sort of hate it to come to that though.

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