One of the treats of living in the DC area is home delivery of the
Washington Post. Today’s edition is particularly strong, carrying with it
strong news stories and valuable opinion pieces. There is a great report on the
courageous Chen Guancheng, the blind Chinese legal activist now in the United
States, and his appearance Thursday before the Council on Foreign Relations in
New York City. The Style section has an extraordinary piece on the death of a
Pentecostal snake-handler written who by a photojournalist who was actually
with the Pastor Randy “Mack” Wolford when he was bit and then died. The photo
of Wolford’s mother stroking her son’s foot as he lies dying is powerful. I was
also moved by the columnist Michael Gerson’s column on empathy. Gerson tells
the moving story of Vice President Biden’s recent speech to families of dead
military members in which Biden recounted his own struggles with suicidal
thoughts in the wake of deaths in his own family.
But for me the very best column was by a man who I often disagree
with, the neoconservative wordsmith Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer’s hawkish
stance on foreign policy is light years removed from mine, but on this we both
agree: President Obama’s drone policy, as detailed in a chilling New York Times
article recently, is a remarkable testament to political hypocrisy and
doublespeak. Here is how Krauthammer puts it:
So the
peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America
having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama
now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger,
smiting by lightning strike.
A rather
strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a
new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s
belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling
the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants
of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.
Of course,
Obama’s hypocrisy is made possible in part by the hypocrisy of the liberal
media establishment’s relative silence in the face of Obama’s drone policy, a
point brought home in the Post the day before by Marc Thiessen in an article
appropriately titled “The Obama-Bush Doctrine”:
Take this
week’s New York Times report on Obama’s drone war.
Imagine the outcry that would have erupted on the left if the Times had
reported that during his time in office, Bush was personally selecting “every
new name on an expanding ‘kill list’” of terrorists to be vaporized? Imagine if
the Times had described White House officials boasting about how Bush “approves
lethal action without handwringing,” or how Bush had told aides that the
decision to kill an American citizen with a drone was an “easy one”? Imagine if
the Times had revealed that Karl Rove, “the president’s closest political
adviser, began showing up at the ‘Terror Tuesday’ meetings” each week in the
Situation Room where decisions were made as to who would live or die?
Thankfully,
there have been consistent voices on these issues, Andrew Bacevich in
particular. He has been unrelenting in his criticism of Obama’s foreign policy
as he was of George W. Bush. If you are looking for an alternative to the media
“coverage” of American foreign policy, I suggest Bacevich’s work and the
insights of others like him at TomDispatch.com
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