You may have seen and applauded the YouTube video of Barney Frank’s verbal smackdown of a twit who accused him at a town hall of backing Obama’s “Nazi” healthcare plan.  I agree that Frank’s righteous put-down was well-executed, but I have to protest the notion that anti-Obama rhetoric represents a recent coarsening of the public discourse.

Bush=Hitler comparisons were common throughout Bush’s tenure.  They got little exposure in the mainstream media — journalists recognized that the Bushitler loonies undermined more serious criticisms of Bush.  But Zombietime spent years collecting photos — the two here are chosen from hundreds on his site.

Interestingly, the young moron in Barney Frank’s audience turns out to be a member of the LaRouche cult.

Lyndon LaRouche doesn’t operate on the same political spectrum as most Americans, but he is a seven-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and LaRouchians say ObamaCare is a “Nazi” policy because it does not include complete socialization of healthcare through a single-payer structure.

In other words, the video shows Barney Frank taking fire from his left.

My point here is not to say “the Left brought this on themselves” with eight years of Bush Derangement Syndrome.  My point is that the flamethrowers on both sides of the aisle do a disservice to their own cause by distracting from more worthy arguments. Also: comparisons with Hitler should be reserved for people with eight-figure death tolls.

At least when the extremist is a protester, it’s relatively easy to shrug it off.  It’s a little bit harder when the inflamed rhetoric comes from the Senate Majority Leader.

Update: GayPatriotWest, who is not a Barney Frank fan, has some parallel thoughts.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the Honeymoon-Over Watch.  According to David J. Rothkopf at Foreign Policy, this should be the last update needed:

Mark it on your calendars.  It was in June 2009 that Barack Obama’s honeymoon officially ended.  And to be more specific, it was this past week.  Through some mysterious alchemy, this was the week that Bush’s economy became Obama’s, Bush’s wars became Obama’s, and the ups and downs of a real workaday relationship with the press also introduced Obama to a more accurate sense of what life was like for Bush and for all his other modern predecessors.

Last week was when Obama’s Presidential Approval Index, as measured by Rasmussen Reports, slipped into negative territory, although it has since recovered to +1 as of today’s report.  Rasmussen focuses on “strongly approve” vs. “strongly disapprove.”  I’m not sure whether this is more significant than measuring total approval vs. total disapproval, but it works against Obama, who in every poll (including Rasmussen’s) is firmly in positive territory on a total approval basis.  (Near the end of the Bush Presidency, GWB logged in at -30 on Rasmussen’s strong-opinion index.)

I’m no Obama-hater, nor do I want him to “fail,” but I’ve been rooting for the end of the honeymoon since before the inauguration.  The media’s near-deification of “The One” has been, at its worst, nothing less than appalling.  Open-minded skepticism (as opposed to cynicism) is generally the right starting point for a journalist, and more of them are getting there, as seen in additional “honeymoon-over” coverage from around the web.

In Newsweek – among the worst Obama up-suckers, as parodied by National Review — Howard Fineman focuses this week on Obama’s evolving relationship with the White House press corps:

Bottom line: things are getting a little testy and are about to get more so. … [T]he problem is that they are too cute by half. They assume they can manipulate, manage and guide the media flawlessly. They think they can ride the wave all the way every time. And why shouldn’t they? Obama’s presidential campaign, after all, was perhaps the shrewdest, most disciplined message machine ever assembled in modern electoral politics. And the coverage, overall, was often close to hagiographic. The presidency is a harder course, and the risk is that, by over-managing, the president and his aides will damage their own credibility with the press and, more important, with the public.

Europeans famously preferred Obama to McCain last fall, but the honeymoon may be over on the other side of the pond as well.  According to Der Spiegel, which James Lileks aptly called the world’s most German-sounding newspaper, America has gone from the “war president” to the “debt president”.  The newspaper predicts a day of reckoning soon:

It is often said that the Chinese and the Japanese will buy [U.S.] government bonds. But the truth of the matter is that trust in the gravitas and reliability of the United States has suffered to such a great degree that fewer and fewer foreigners are purchasing its government bonds. That’s why the Federal Reserve is now buying securities that it has printed itself. The Fed’s balance sheet has more than doubled since 2007, making the US central bank one of the world’s fastest-growing companies. The purpose of this company, though, is to create money out of thin air. …

The German response to the excesses of the Bush era was refusal and obstinacy. Gerhard Schröder refused to go to war in Iraq with America and he organized a European resistance front the reached from Moscow to Paris.

Germany still hasn’t provided its response to the Obama administration’s fiscal policy excesses. Perhaps its time for Merkel to take her cue from Schröder.

Professor Julian Zelizer of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School:

If there is any new dip in the economy, the public will blame President Obama rather than President Bush. This is exactly what happened with the recession in 1937, which FDR’s opponents called the “Roosevelt Recession,” using the downturn to diminish the number of New Deal liberals in the House and Senate in 1938.

Quoting Jonah Goldberg, who’s quoting others:

Thanks to a few pointed questions from the press corps at a White House news conference, the long Obama captivity of the media is at an end. The Hotline, an inside-the-Beltway tip sheet, proclaimed June 23 “The Day the Love Ended.”

The New York Daily News’s Michael Goodwin celebrates the press corps’s ability to channel the mood of the country: “By peppering the President with forceful questions . . . and by challenging some of his slippery answers, reporters captured the changing tone in the country. Like the end of a real honeymoon, blind infatuation is giving way to a more accurate view of reality.”

“The press corps gets it,” Goodwin writes. “For Obama, the hard part begins now.”

I’ll end with two more passages from the Rothkopf essay I started with, which is titled “The definitive, final, once and for all, Obama’s honeymoon-is-over story.” He helpfully includes a mini-roundup of other publications and websites that have declared this week that the honeymoon is over:

Of course, people have been writing about the end of Obama’s honeymoon since the day he arrived in office. [Pikers! My Honeymoon-Over Watch started January 15! - KP.] But let me offer 10 solid pieces of evidence that it was over by this week.  And I say this despite the unnerving fact that the Daily Kos seems to agree with my assessment…and shored up by the fact that NBC’s Chuck Todd, CNN’s Jack Cafferty, CQ, the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, and a host of other media outlets all seem to agree by having grappled with the issue…or, depending on how you look at it, succumbed to the conventional wisdom…in the past week or 10 days.  Just goes to show: even the conventional wisdom is right every once in a while. …

[details snipped]

The honeymoon is done. Time for a real life marriage. For better or for worse.

And for richer or poorer.  Fortunately, America doesn’t marry its leaders “until death do us part.” And no, dammit, I’m not wishing anybody dead.  I’m celebrating the fact that in three-plus years, our system will give us an opportunity for a course correction under new leadership, if enough Americans come to believe one is needed. In the meantime, Mr. Obama is my president, and on some level at least I wish him well.

(Welcome, GayPatriot readers)

Since he turned against the Iraq War that he once championed, Andrew Sullivan has taken to using the term “neocon” as a curse word.  “The neocon hope that Ahmadinejad keeps himself in power – barely disguised any more – seems to me premature,” Sullivan said a few days ago — while linking to a blog post that is more accurately summarized by its own headline: “The Bright Side of Ahmadinejad’s ‘Win’”.

So when I saw Sullivan’s headline this morning — “The Good Neocons” — I was prepared for sarcasm.  But he was praising the work of two writers, Michael J. Totten (who years ago rejected the neocon label) and Daniel Finkelstein, whose London Times article Sullivan then quoted at length.  The whole thing is worth reading, but it was a different passage that jumped out at me:

Now, there is something you need to know. I am a neocon. Given all that has happened over the past ten years, I am sure my PR consultant would advise me to drop this label. But I don’t employ a PR consultant. [KP note: please contact me if you'd like to discuss your PR needs.] So, stubbornly, I cling on to the designation. It declares my belief in two things – that in every country in the world, wherever it may be and whatever its traditions, the people yearn for liberty, for free expression and for democracy; and that the spread of liberty and democracy (not necessarily through the barrel of a gun) is the only real way to bring peace to the world. I believe that what we are seeing on the streets of Iran now is a vindication of these neoconservative ideas.

Hear hear, and I’ll take it a step further:  It is a vindication of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq.

I sniped at Sullivan in my first Iran post for saying that Obama inspired the Iranian revolt by sweeping away the Bush years.   To me it seems self-evident that exactly the opposite is true.  If the Bush Administration had not planted democracies (albeit still troubled democracies) in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s inconceivable to me that so many Iranians would risk their lives and their freedom for an idealistic vision that did not yet exist in their neighborhood.  Just as it was inconceivable that Libya would renounce its nuclear ambitions in the absence of a credible threat.

In the long run, the only hope for victory over Islamic fascism is a Reformation within Islam.  As Jews and Christians have evolved beyond the most repugnant parts of their own scriptures, so too can Islam.   If an Islamic Reformation occurs, the democracies that President Bush helped install in the heart of the ancient Caliphate will play an important role.

And yes, I’m a neocon too.

(Photo: Mousavi1388)

Pity the mullahs who cling to power in Iran.  With budding (albeit flawed) democracies to the east and west, with tens of thousands of angry people protesting the tainted election of a figurehead, with web-savvy dissidents informing the world via Twitter, YouTube and Flickr — what’s a frightened theocrat to do?

Here’s my favorite image thus far — evoking the lone man facing down the Tiananmen tanks, a woman shakes her fist and waves the green flag of revolution at the advancing riot troops.  You go, sister — next thing you know, she’ll be uncovering her head.

Andrew Sullivan is proclaiming that a coup has taken place, and he’s furnishing continuous updates.  Interestingly, the other day it looked like Sullivan was giving props to the man who set the first dominos in motion:

How is what is happening in Iran not exactly what the Bush administration wanted to happen in Arab regimes? New technology, massive over-reach by the Ahmadinejad forces, emerging women’s voices: these have already precipitated a fracturing of the regime.

Set aside the quibble that Iran is Persian rather than Arab — this is indeed exactly the kind of development that President Bush sought to precipitate with the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan.  And it’s great that Sullivan was finally able to set aside his hatred of all things GWB to recognize that.

Or… did he?  Sullivan continues:

And what achieved this? In a strange way, the messianic radicalism of Bush sustained the messianic radicalism of Ahmadinejad. Obama’s election, as many of us hoped, broke that cycle and allowed for Iran’s opposition to re-emerge without looking like a pawn of the US.

The mind reels.  Still, Sullivan has been one of the best sources for fresh updates on Iran.  Others are Michael J. Totten, NYT’s The Lede blog  and, for photographs, TehranLive.org.

President Obama sometimes sounds a lot like President Bush — and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Barack Hussein Obama, Cairo University, June 4, 2009:

But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things:  the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.  These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.  And that is why we will support them everywhere.

George Walker Bush, second inaugural address, January 20, 2005:

America’s belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty…. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

If the passages were swapped one for the other, neither president would miss a beat.

I’ll second Rich Lowry’s assessment at The Corner:

I don’t want to make exalted claims for the speech. It was a mixed bag and there are limits to the effect any one speech can have. But I think some in the conservative blogosphere are pronouncing it a scandal because they leave out all the good things. Consider: He extolled America as “one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known”; pledged we will “relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our country”; condemned Holocaust denial as “baseless, ignorant, and hateful”; said “it is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus”; insisted that “the Arab-Israel conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems”; and called for more democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights in the Muslim world. And he got a standing ovation.

Photo: White House

Update: Nevermind.

Unlike many conservatives, I love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He’s a very funny man, backed by an outstanding research staff.  His views skew hard to the left, but he’s not an America-basher like Michael Moore.

The idea that he’s the primary source of information for legions of college students is a little scary… but anyone who watched the April 28 episode got to see a very spirited and substantive debate on the issue of interrogation techniques.

Because of careful preparation and home-field advantage, Stewart often runs circles around his guests.  But Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies more than held his own, and in the process very effectively made the point that different people can honorably draw lines in different places.

In the heat of the debate, Stewart responded to May’s question by saying yes, President Truman was a war criminal because of the atomic bomb attacks.  As Michael Goldfarb points out on the Weekly Standard:

He’s certainly not the only American who would take that view, but it’s a useful reminder that the most vocal and popular criticism of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies comes from people who, if they were being as honest as Stewart, would also judge Lincoln (suspension of habeas), FDR (internment), and Truman (use of nuclear weapons) as war criminals or tyrants or worse.

Somehow I think Stewart would moderate his opinions about Truman if he took a little more time to think about it.  My take? Truman certainly wasn’t a war criminal. The Hiroshima bomb undeniably saved many American lives compared to an invasion, and may even have saved Japanese lives on a net basis.  I’m more troubled by Nagsaki just three days later.

Was it worth it?

The Washington Post offers the best argument I’ve seen for a bipartisan commission into the use of torture, or “torture” if you prefer, by Americans during the Bush Administration.  The editorial ends with this (emphasis added):

But a presidential commission could produce the fullest, least-heated account possible.

Once it did so, prosecutions would not be the only option. Based on what we know today, we do not believe they would be the best option. For reasons laid out at the beginning of this editorial, we would be extremely reluctant to go after lawyers and officials acting in what they believed to be the nation’s best interest at a time of grave danger. If laws were broken, Congress or the president can opt for amnesty. In gray areas, the government can exercise prosecutorial discretion. But the work of the commission should not be prejudged. And the prudence of not prosecuting, if that proves the wisest course, would earn more respect, here and abroad, if it followed a process of thorough review and calm deliberation.

And here are some of the “reasons laid out at the beginning of this editorial:

On one side, you have the sacred American tradition of peacefully transferring power from one party to another every four or eight years without cycles of revenge and criminal investigation. It’s one thing to investigate Richard Nixon for authorizing wiretaps and burglaries in secrecy, outside the normal channels of government, for personal political gain. It’s another to criminalize decisions authorized through all the proper channels, with congressional approval or at least awareness, for what everyone agrees to be the high purpose of keeping Americans safe from terrorist attack. Once you start down that road, where do you stop? Should Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger and their team have been held criminally or civilly liable for dereliction of duty 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, given that they knowingly allowed Osama bin Laden to flee Sudan for sanctuary in Afghanistan? What if the next administration believes that Barack Obama is committing war crimes every time he allows the Air Force to fling missiles into Pakistan, killing innocent civilians in a country with which we are not at war?

In an Oval Office press availability after meeting with the king of Jordan last week, Obama said:

… this has been a difficult chapter in our history, and one of the tougher decisions that I’ve had to make as President. On the one hand, we have very real enemies out there. And we rely on some very courageous people, not just in our military but also in the Central Intelligence Agency, to help protect the American people. And they have to make some very difficult decisions because, as I mentioned yesterday, they are confronted with an enemy that doesn’t have scruples, that isn’t constrained by constitutions, aren’t constrained by legal niceties.

Having said that, the OLC memos that were released reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings.

Hawk though I am, Obama’s statements here work for me.  I voted for Bush in 2004, and would do so again today if he were running against Kerry.  Because of widespread Bush Derangement Syndrome in the media and the Democratic Party, my instinct is to defend Bush against almost any attack, at least in his role as commander-in-chief.

But regarding the torture issue, all I can say is I hope they saved a lot of American lives with whatever information they waterboarded out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and whoever else, because the ramifications are going to continue for years. I’ve thought for some time that the best spin I can put on it is to say that “America” — I’ll not blame Bush alone, although it happened on his watch — abandoned the moral high ground on the issue of torture.  We should reclaim the moral high ground, and a fact-finding commission may be the best way to start.

Update: From this morning’s WaPo, a news article with a fairly balanced cost-benefit analysis of the torture/harsh interrogation program.  This part rings true to me:

The Obama administration’s top intelligence officer, Dennis C. Blair, has said the information obtained through the interrogation program was of “high value.” But he also concluded that those gains weren’t worth the cost.

“There is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Blair said in a statement. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

Limbaugh offers snark and bile

Parts of the right-o-sphere are all aflutter, debating whether President Obama deserves any credit for the rescue of a maritime hero held by pirates.

It’s a reminder that Obama Derangement Syndrome is no more appropriate than its more wide-spread predecessor, Bush Derangement Syndrome.

In The Corner, Jonah Goldberg piped up promptly and congratulated the President for authorizing the mission.  Later he took incoming fire from his right, as it turned out the President may not have specifically authorized the mission, he may just have refrained from interfering.  Jonah stood firm:

But you know what? Congratulations anyway. It’s good news the captain was rescued; Obama is the commander-in-chief and this happened on his watch; if he were thoroughly Carteresque he would have ordered that the pirates not be harmed, and you can be sure some of the snark-and-bilers would be blaming Obama if this ended badly (and I might have been one of them).

Look, I think my credentials as a critic of Obama are pretty solid. But I find the idea that I have to be critical no matter what Obama does to be exhaustingly unappealing.

Hear, hear.  But Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the side of snark-and-bile, saying sarcastically, “I would like to not only jump on the bandwagon of praising President Obama for a brilliant rescue, not only a plan but its execution, I don’t think the Navy had that much to do with it.”  He went on to fantasize at great length about who would play Obama in the movie, settling on Will Smith as both the President AND the Navy SEALs commander who took the crucial shot.  He later speculated  that if this had happened in the previous administration, the headlines would have been along the lines of Bush Assassinates Three Black Teenagers.  Exhaustively unappealing, indeed.

Just before the inauguration, Limbaugh famously said “I hope Obama fails.”  He clarified:

I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year-and-a-half.  I know what his politics are.  I know what his plans are, as he has stated them.  I don’t want them to succeed.

But of course he knew what the sound bite would be.  I often tell my liberal friends, don’t blame me for Rush Limbaugh and I won’t blame you for Michael Moore.

Most conservative commentators I saw came down closer to Goldberg’s opinion.  Abe Greenwald at Commentary didn’t single out the President by name, but said:

Fantastic news all around. The U.S. did not dither with negotiations or treat this as a criminal matter. It acted unilaterally and with force to free a brave man.

National Review’s Andy McCarthy notes that conservatives might well have expected a different outcome, based on the President’s past rhetoric:

Obama’s posturing put the pieces in place for a disaster. When an American-flagged ship was besieged, the president might have been paralyzed by his solicitude for the Islamic world and his commitment against unilateral action. He might have subordinated the safety of Americans to the bridge-building he has dubiously claimed to be central to our security. As commander-in-chief, he could have handcuffed the Navy. But he didn’t. Whatever his predilections, Obama unleashed John Wayne when that’s what was needed. For that we should be pleased and acknowledge a job well done.

Even Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs offered unambiguous approval (some of his lizardoid commenters were predictably less gracious):

The US Navy did us proud today. And yes, I know we’re supposed to detest and mock everything President Obama does, on pain of excommunication, but as Commander in Chief he deserves congratulations for handling this one just right.

I cast my vote in the comments of my previous post on the topic — ” I don’t think he did anything heroic, but I think he handled it fine.”  I’ll stand by that, although I might phrase it a little more graciously.  It wasn’t on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the Commander in Chief did well in his first live-action military test.

It’s not over, of course.  Somali pirates hijacked more ships today — it’s a business model that works for them.  It will be interesting to see if they try to grab any more American ships.

President Bush salutes in front of General David Petraeus
and Admiral William Fallon, September 2007, in Iraq

President Obama today announced an Iraq withdrawal plan that George Bush would be proud to call his own. Actually, it IS Bush’s own.

Don’t be fooled by the lawyerly language in his pledge to complete “the responsible removal of our combat brigades from Iraq” by August 2010. He’s leaving up to 50,000 troops in place until the end of 2011, and I guarantee that they’ll have weapons and the capability of responding with more than battalion strength. I’m not sure how he’s defining “combat brigades,” but he must be dancing close to an outright lie — a brigade is only 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, it looks to me like he’s leaving three divisions in place.

Thank God.

Fully seven months ago, in July, I wrote the following:

If it’s going to become Mr. Obama’s war, I can take some comfort in the fact that at least he’s showing signs of an ability to think independently of the extreme pacifist wing of his party.

Candidate Obama already was tacking to the right on the war — his clarion call for surrender lost its usefulness as a wedge issue once Hillary Clinton withdrew from the race. The previously hapless George Bush had finally found the right general and the right strategy. Well before the election, even Obama had to acknowledge that the surge had “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

After winning in November, Obama co-opted Hillary and her one-time support for the war by naming her Secretary of State. But the clearest indication that the grown-ups would be in charge of the war came when Obama announced that he was retaining Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who oversaw the turnaround in Iraq. I feel much better about the Obama Presidency now than I did on Election Day.

The Bush Administration won the war in Iraq just in time, making it too late for the Democrats to surrender. The real test will come with the war Obama says he wants to fight, in Afghanistan. I wish him every success.

(Photo: Associated Press)

Incomplete election returns from Iraq are very heartening. In addition to being almost completely peaceful — with security provided solely by Iraqi forces, with Americans on standby — the results appear to have strengthened the secular government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The various Sunni factions, which largely boycotted the 2005 elections, appear to have won representation proportionate to their numbers, giving them a stake in the government.

From an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

The big loser in this election was Iran. Iranian agents spent a lot of money trying to influence the outcome of the elections in the south, and they largely failed. Iran’s favored parties did poorly. The Iranians had hoped to persuade Iraqi voters to punish Mr. Maliki for signing the security agreement with the United States. Instead, these elections proved to be a powerful vote of confidence for the prime minister and his policies, including that agreement.

The big winner in this election was the concept of a unitary Iraq. An attempt to hold a referendum on establishing an autonomous Basra failed before the election. ISCI, the only Arab party that had favored the creation of an autonomous Shiite region, lost ground throughout that region, including in its own stronghold of Najaf. Iraqis have sent a clear message that they want to live in a single state with a strong central government connected to strong provincial governments, rather than in some sort of artificially federated state.

…

Iraq has gone from being an impending disaster to a golden opportunity. Helping Iraqi internal politics develop peacefully and across sectarian lines is a critical part of reintegrating Iraq into the Arab world, making the world’s only Shiite-controlled Arab state acceptable to the Sunni regimes that surround it. That reintegration, in turn, offers tantalizing prospects for balancing Iran and stabilizing the heart of the Muslim world. The stakes in Iraq remain very high, but we are finally starting to see the return on our investment.

Thank you, President Bush. The only way to defeat Islamic fascism is to nurture and support peaceful alternatives in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Iraq is a good start.

(Photo: AP)