"Just Like Bush"

A couple of days ago I made a comment about the absurdity of people on the left saying President Obama was just like Bush. What it boiled to to for me was this.

Now call me crazy but I thought the whole reason Bush/Cheney set up GITMO was to keep the detainees away from any kind of Judicial oversight. And there are of course questions about the level of Congressional oversight Bush provided. So again this is approach is pretty much the OPPOSITE of what Bush was doing.

Now don’t get me wrong, many people may not be convinced of President Obama’s words. And lets say they might have good reason. Still if you go by his words his approach is to embrace oversight which was the exact opposite of the Bush approach. So I don’t see how even people who disagree with President Obama’s approach are now saying this is “just like Bush”. Simply put, it isn’t.

Today Jim Hoagland makes, essentially, the same argument

George W. Bush's refusal to work with Congress and other nations to update national and international legal norms to fight al-Qaeda immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, now haunts the nation and his successor. Bush's stubborn rejection of sharing authority, and responsibility, left us to fight a 21st-century enemy with mid-20th-century instruments of justice.

Today the failure to grasp the need for change created by the globalization of crime and punishment has migrated to the opposite end of the spectrum -- to the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics on the left who absurdly accuse President Obama of adopting the Bush agenda on national security as his own. They are now the ones who are stuck in time.

Speaking somewhat caustically at the National Archives on Thursday, Obama implicitly urged these critics not to rush past the obvious.

Unlike Bush, this president insists on oversight of his actions by the courts and Congress. And he wants to collaborate with Congress on detention policies that "should not be the decision of any one man." Obama hinted that among the modifications he would like to see is a form of preventive detention for suspected terrorists who cannot be convicted in U.S. courts but who "remain at war with the United States." He views them as prisoners of war -- but a different kind of war.

Now this criticism is particularly frustrating to me. I worry that by using that kind of hyperbole we end up creating a situation where people in the middle who aren’t political junkies end up really and truly believing that there is no difference between Obama and Bush, no difference between Democrats and Republicans and thats a dangerous situation when you are talking about future elections. If people in the middle get it in their heads that no matter who is in office or what party they are from, the same things are going to happen, then there is a good likelyhood that they won’t go to the polls and vote to keep Democrats in or vote to knock Republicans out. And the truth is while many civil libertarians and human rights activists are dissappointed in Obama, I don’t really believe any of them truly wish we had a President McCain in office instead. Yet in a way they may be helping to push people in the middle to that belief. Thats what is frustrating to me. Not that they are making the argument, but HOW they are making it.

(h/t DougJ)