Newsweek: Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?

Here's the article. I doubt Andrew Sullivan himself would be okay with that headline, because the actual article is called "How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics." The head honchos at Newsweek did a great job with that cover, though. It definitely drew me in. I don't like being called dumb. Fuckers.

Sullivan takes it upon himself to take all the arguments against Obama from both the right and the left, and debunk them. He did a great job talking about the right's arguments, because it's impossible not to. The right is made up of a bunch of fucking morons and none of their arguments make any god damn sense. That's always the fun part, and I'm not going to talk about it. The hard part is liberals debating liberals, because that requires actual intelligent debate.

[Leftists] miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A depression was averted.

Not everyone would agree with that. Paul Krugman doesn't: "It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression." More children are living in poverty now than any other time in American history: one in five. One in five kids in America are below the poverty line. American ghettos are looking like third world countries. Just because this isn't being shown on the news doesn't mean it isn't happening. This situation is fucking bad. When Sullivan says "a depression was averted," what he really means is that the only people left with any money still have their money. "The economy" is just some vague term describing how confident the upper classes are about their own security. The poor are still being left behind, as they always have been in the United States.

The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind.

This is just flatout false. 5,500 private security forces were left behind. A massive CIA station, with Special Ops troops operating out of uniform, were left behind. Tens of thousands of troops were left behind across the border in Kuwait, and the U.S. still has dominance over Iraq's coastlines and airspace. We haven't left. And Obama does not deserve credit for withdrawing our main troops from Iraq. He tried to keep anywhere between 10,000-20,000 troops in Iraq. He wanted to break the deal. The Iraqi Prime Minister fought him on it, and he thankfully won. This is important. Why doesn't anybody fucking know about this? I keep repeating it to everyone I talk to about Iraq, and I'm always met with the same level of shock and confusion. It's Obama's critics who are "dumb" though.

Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements.

This is meaningless. "Defense" spending is still higher than any time during the Cold War. Still higher than any other time in American history in fact, even surpassing World War II. We are living in the military industrial complex nightmare Eisenhower warned us about. Obama has no power over this, the forces around him are too great.

Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life.

Great. I think what we should be celebrating is these things happening in spite of the president. Obama is against same sex marriage and marijuana legalization.

Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department.

Absolutely right. Thank you.

Torture was ended.

No it wasn't. Waterboarding was ended. That is one form of torture. Psychological torture is still taught in army manuals. Bradley Manning was tortured. Torture is still going on under Obama. And it's not like his administration ever cared about torture, beyond how it effects him as a political issue. Obama's administration threatened to stop sharing information with the UK if they revealed that one of their citizens was tortured in a CIA blacksite during the Bush years. He was hung from a ceiling and his testicles were slashed with a razor. Just shut up and pretend it didn't happen, Obama '12.

Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush.

None of these arguments addresses the fact that his administration is in bed with Wall Street.

Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.

Personally, I'd rather have 4 years of getting shit done than 8 years of strengthening the system that caused the collapse in the first place. To be perfectly honest though, I am a little curious to see how an Obama presidency would turn out when it's not spent campaigning for another election years away. I really don't see how Obama can lose 2012. Romney's going to be 2004's Kerry.

Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself).

So Obama signed away two amendments of the Bill of Rights, and we're all at risk of being rounded up in concentration camps and tortured. Yawn.

But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return.

Torture has not ended, and thanks to Obama's half-assed political gestures, waterboarding will probably return after he leaves office in 2016 anyway.

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin...

Uh huh.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008.

So you end the article by quoting a non-moderate socialist. This is a joke. I'm getting a little sick of these holier-than-thou Jon Stewart moderates acting like the gatekeepers of what we can say and how far we can go. I'm sorry if torturing, child murdering Democrats upset me just as much as torturing, child murdering Republicans. Excuse me.

I posted this Newsweek cover in my tumblr yesterday before it was out, and left the comment "Can’t wait to read this and have an aneurysm." (success!) A follower of mine replied. I didn't reply back because I try not to make a habit of getting into arguments with strangers on the internet, but this is what she said:

No politician will ever be perfect, so I’d rather take the person I agree with on the most issues. I’m not okay with all of his strategies, but it’s better than disagreeing with those plus even more I don’t agree with considering other options

I can't even tell you how many times this has been said to me. The systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people is a little more than an "issue" to me. Seriously. Why doesn't war fucking bother anyone? Right in this very article, you got a war apologist claiming Orwell. What the actual fuck. I can't be the only one who feels like he's a survivor in a zombie apocalypse. Liberals get their panties in a bunch over some racist newsletters from 20 years ago that Ron Paul didn't even fucking write, but you never see nearly the same kind of outrage over Obama murdering of thousands of women and children. Doesn't anyone notice this? I really feel like giving up. If liberals are willing to sacrifice habeas corpus and thousands of innocent lives for a few feel-good tidbits about gay rights, then there's absolutely nothing I can say to them. They're nationalistic partisans and they're not going to think.