The Other McCain

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The Triumph of Raaaaacism: Liberals Get in Touch With Their Inner Teabagger

Posted on | March 21, 2011 | 24 Comments

First it was Michael Moore and now they’re all piling on. Ralph Nader says Obama should be impeached for war crimes, Josh Marshall says the president’s Libya policy is “a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas,” and Andrew Sullivan . . .

Well, frankly, I’m beginning to feel a twinge of sympathy for Sully. Look at how all these smug people are cruelly mocking him:

You were played. I told you so at the time. The whole hope-and-change thing was an obvious con, and you were among the rubes who fell for it anyway. And yeah, I’m rubbing it in.

Sully’s perplexed and depressed and is clearly in desperate need of something to cheer him up.

Nothing would make Andrew Sullivan happier than to have a Bible-thumping Texas Republican back in the White House, so he could hate the American president without guilt or shame.

Instead, he’s stuck trying to claim that Obama has been duped into war by John McCain and Hillary Clinton:

I mean, you know, we go into a Middle Eastern country, we don’t know the consequences, it’s been hatched by Hillary and McCain. I mean, what could go wrong? . . .
I don’t know why anybody voted for Obama in the primaries. . . . [T]his no-fly zone, this war essentially, is, is a Hillary-McCain concept.
Look, we, people who voted for this guy wanted him to let the old politics go. . . . Wanted him to actually tell us the truth about this stuff and to do the right thing. And that was the appeal of Obama. And two years later, we have this politicized Clintonian mess.

How long before Sully starts in — “just asking questions” — demanding to see Obama’s long-form birth certificate?

UPDATE: Linked by Da Tech Guy, who points out that Sully’s turn against Bush was manifestly motivated by (ahem) domestic issues. Da Tech Guy also links to Dan Riehl’s reminder of Sully’s October 2008 “Top 10 Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Obama,” a chuckle-strewn stroll down schadenfreude lane.

UPDATE II: The sad thing is that Obama tried so hard to give liberals the kind of designer-boutique war that they always said they were willing to support:

In its opening phase, at least, our war in Libya looks like the beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention. It was blessed by the United Nations Security Council. It was endorsed by the Arab League. It was pushed by the diplomats at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, rather than the military men at Robert Gates’s Pentagon. Its humanitarian purpose is much clearer than its connection to American national security. And it was initiated not by the U.S. Marines or the Air Force, but by the fighter jets of the French Republic.

For decades, the overarching foreign-policy strategy of Democrats has been to hamstring the U.S. military with so many diplomatic preconditions and political restraints that our troops could not possibly win any war worth winning.

So when Democrats are in charge, the U.S. only engages in military actions that aren’t worth winning and which do not serve our national interests — e.g., Wesley Clark’s bombing campaign against Serbia, which alienated Russia while emboldening the Islamic terrorists of the KLA. When Republicans are in charge, and the military actually tries to, y’know, win an important war, Democrats cheer for the foreigners who are trying to kill our troops.

UPDATE III: Linked by Cold Fury: “Y’all better get those giant puppet heads out of storage toot damned suite. The whole world is watching, you precious, hypocritical twits.”

UPDATE IV: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


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Category: Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Libya

Comments

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  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    So Obama has lost the pacifists and the far left, but he probably lost them anyway when he sent more troops to Afghanistan. The thing is, in this case here they’re right. Is this what the presidency has descended to, an enforcement arm of the European Union and the UN, with no need whatsoever to confer with the Congress?

    I’m going to be perfectly blunt here, and its not pleasant. A lot of you people on the right have made jackasses of yourselves over this issue, but at least, since he did do this end-run around Congress, you might have a little breathing room and a chance to partially, maybe as good as halfway redeem yourselves on this issue.

    Bu halfway is as good as its going to get here, if that good. You’ve embarrassed yourselves, you just haven’t caught on to it yet. Maybe once a few hundred more missiles are lobbed into Israeli territory you’ll catch on.

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  • Anonymous

    You’ve embarrassed yourselves, you just haven’t caught on to it yet.

    Dude: I’m not in charge of the policy, and am therefore not responsible for the policy. I’m merely pointing out that the policy is ridiculous.

    Maybe once a few hundred more missiles are lobbed into Israeli territory you’ll catch on.

    Israel can whup the dogshit out of any enemy that tries to attack them. What the anti-Israel camp cannot seem to understand is that for the past 20 years U.S. policy, under both Democrat and Republican presidents, has been to attempt to restrain Israel from doling out the ass-whuppings its enemies deserve.

    Iran? Brother, please. If it weren’t for the U.S. holding Israel back, the IDF would have already blown Iran’s nuke program off the planet.

  • Joe

    If Andrew needs friends, he might try Patterico. They would make a great couple.

  • JeffS

    In more ways than one?

    ;-D

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    Here’s the thing. I don’t want to come across as overly harsh, but damn it, I don’t know how many conservative bloggers I’ve read criticizing Obama for not supporting the insurgents in Egypt, for not supporting them in Libya. And these are the same insurgents the left supports. They’re eating this up.

    Oh, and Qaddafi? Yeah, he’s a scumbag, granted, but remember this. He was moving closer and closer toward the position of Mubarak, who love him or hate him, was our stalwart ally.

    Nothing would suit them better than to see the Middle East come under what they are in their own minds sure would be some kind of socialist entity. Then, under their scenario, the Middle East would have peace, because guess who would then be forced to make an accommodation with the Palestinians. That’s right, they believe there can really be a one state solution involving the Israelis and their enemies, who they insist will constitute the majority.

    Yes, they believe this. I read these people’s blogs, I comment on them, I argue with them, and I can tell you they are deadly serious. Blogs like Renegade Eye and Troutsky have been predicting this crap for years.

    And look who all is involved in this crap, people like the SEIU, other international unions, groups like Code Pink, the list goes on and on. Oh, and of course, if the new Middle East cuts us out of our oil supply, that’s just gravy. That just means that much more emphasis on green energy sources.

    And who really stands to benefit from all this? The European Union, of course, who will gladly step up to the plate and pay good money for all that oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc., that we would probably get cut off from. So yeah, they can afford to cut their losses with Qaddafi. Look how much more they stand to gain.

    They fact that it might blow up in their faces would never occur to them, and its irrelevant anyway. What matters is what they want and what they’re willing to do. And Obama, he’s just playing right along.

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  • Just Me

    Remember a few years ago when the lefties were insisting that “reality has a well-known liberal bias”?

    What happened to that?

  • http://herbegerenews.wordpress.com/ Bigol

    I wonder where the headlines are like this?

    http://herbegerenews.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/monday-21-march-2011-war-protest/

    Hype and hypocrisy rule …

    B

  • Anonymous

    Timothy P. Carney is asking some incisive and very serious questions about the Obama administration’s Libya policy in this morning’s Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/03/no-debate-and-no-objective-obama-enters-war. Every American citizen, regardless of where he/she stands on Libya, should demand that these types of questions be answered (and I think Boehner was hinting, in his “statement,” of just such a reckoning).

    That said, I’m skeptical that the current “base” of criticism of Obama’s Libya policy would significantly weaken the administration’s domestic political situation as long as those criticisms are sequestered from elite circles, and DC Beltway and MSM discourses.

    For now, at least, the more strident criticisms are coming from a hodge-podge of intellectual/ideological “fringe” elements such as the hard-left pseudo-passivists (e.g., Michael Moore), paleo-progressives (e.g., Andrew Sullivan), Rothbardian libertarians/anarcho-capitalists (e.g., Lew Rockwell, or Karl Hess before him), the “crunchy” cosmo-cons whose anti-interventionary impulse is so strong that they almost turn into amateur Arabists/Orientalists/Russianists while trying to apologize for every external threat, even the serious ones (e.g., Daniel Larison).

    At times, the above groups can influence elites (who, in turn, would spread the messages), but I question their abilties to popularize criticisms of The One on their own.

    There was a time (right, Stacy?) when MSM “reporters” would have halfway pursued the types of questions Carney is asking, even though the president was a Democrat. Now, they’ll have to be cattle-prodded to do it. And that could happen, but not because Michael Moore and Andrew Sullivan are disillusioned.

  • Mikey NTH

    Sully – it doesn’t say much for your intelligence that you were duped by a man who has been duped by Hillary Clinton, John McCain and John Kerry.

    Heh, indeed!

  • LB
  • Anonymous

    Too funny for words! I love seeing liberals squirm!

  • Victorerimita

    Great post.

  • David R. Graham

    I am with the greatest of difficulty trying to understand what this pagan leopard is saying. That socialist “humanitarians” and some conservative bloggers both want US military on an humanitarian mission, but with operating weapons, to support the same people: “freedom fighters/rebels/democracy advocates” in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iran, etc? And that that sets up left and right ideological sentiments in the same bar concurring “we should” scenarios? And pagan leopard is savoring or shunning this coincidence of alleged opposites? Or not? I don’t know. Stacy’s a better man than I, for he seems to understand that of which this cove writes, and how to respond to it. I just see a mass of flying glass without edge or hardness.

  • http://joeschmo1of3.blogspot.com/ joeschmo1of3

    Concern troll is concerned…

  • David R. Graham

    If chaotics (liberals) are upset with their lightgiver over this latest and other acts of commission and omission, it means they do have principles, at least one.

    One can’t be upset about something without having a fixed point (principle) of reference against which one measures actual experience. Anger occurs when frustration is experienced. But the possibility of frustration requires a fixed point measured against which one’s wishes can be frustrated.

    So chaotics have at least one principle. The evidence that they do is that they can show anger from being frustrated.

    Let’s say (arguable) that their one principle is chaos. Or more precisely, let’s say that their one principle is opportunities for exploitations of wealth, women and land that exist in conditions of chaos, which are desirable for that reason.

    If they’re angry at their lightgiver for bombing Libyans, it means they see that act as subverting chaos and its attending opportunities for their self-aggrandizement among those three primal objects of greed: money, women, land. Their lightgiver is making them angry either by ignoring opportunities for creating new chaos stateside, to benefit them, or by imposing some degree of order (chaotics’ truly hated phenomenon) in a region whose chaos they were vicariously enjoying (Sullivan?) or directly promoting (Farrakhan?).

    But I think they don’t have to worry. Without a defined military mission (compared to an humanitarian one, which is not military purview per se) — and there is none, nor will there be one — the affair is a mess from the start and can only get messier. Typical Democratic POTUS armed conflict. They prefer “police action” or “humanitarian relief.” Doubts? Consult the Arab League, who just ambushed a White House occupier they hate (because he’s an Iranian partisan).

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    You’re damn straight I’m concerned. I don’t support this crap, never have, never will. I don’t even know what your point here is. Are you saying there hasn’t been a lot of conservatives encouraging support for the same so-called “freedom loving”, “democratic insurgents” the left supports? Or are you supporting a different group of “freedom fighters” than the left is supporting. That’s odd, I’ve never seen two different groups delineated, all I hear is talk about freedom loving Arabs yearning to be free, and usually taking to the street right after Friday morning prayers.

    Everybody that supports them can pound sand as far as I’m concerned, whether left or right, including Sean Hannity and that idiotic football toss of his. I wish the damn thing would fly back and break his eff’n nose sometimes.

    Ask the Israelis how much support they have for them. See if they consider people like me a “concern troll”. I’m sure that, like me, they could find plenty to criticize Obama about. I’m sure the last thing they want is for Obama to be involved in the Middle East on any level after what he’s already put them through.

    In the meantime, if this thing gets too far out of hand and spreads throughout the region and ends up sending the place up in flames, I hope you have a good time filling your gas tank with corn ethanol and paying double what you’re paying now at the supermarket. Remember, actions have consequences.

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    The Arab League? Oh yeah, that would be that great group of guys who were asking for the West to intervene and impose a No-Fly Zone. Of course that was before it happened. Now that the West has done what they wanted, suddenly they seem to be saying that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. See, you can’t win with these damn people.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_HWNEJ5YAOL62SA3MRRMQNVAN7E Jm Hanes

    “For decades, the overarching foreign-policy strategy of Democrats has been to hamstring the U.S. military with so many diplomatic preconditions and political restraints…..”

    Not to mention the spectre of civil & criminal liabilities which turn Rules of Engagement into suicidal handcuffs.

    The ICC fan club must be positively thrilled that the Obama Administration has apparently determined that a U.N. mandate supersedes anything as parochial as a Congressional AUMF. Of course, Democrats on the Hill have spent years pretending that the last one wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, which makes for a mootable precedent, no?

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