THE LEFT EXISTS ONLY TO AMUSE US:

The First Casualty of War (Robert Stacy McCain, 3.22.11, American Spectator)

Less sober, but more personally aggrieved, was the Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan, who during the Bush years went from being an initial supporter of the president's aggressive anti-terrorism stance to being one of Bush's most outspoken critics. After Saturday's first air strikes against Gaddafi, Sullivan recalled Obama's own words from a December 2007 interview with the Boston Globe: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Libya posed no such threat, Sullivan wrote Saturday, saying he had supported Obama in the Democratic primaries against Clinton and in the general election against Republican Sen. John McCain because "both Clinton and McCain were unrepentant fans of presidential war-making powers.… But the president we supported is not, it is now clear, the president that we have." And in a Sunday TV appearance with Chris Matthews, Sullivan huffed: "I don't know why anybody voted for Obama in the primaries."

The sense of being betrayed by Obama wasn't limited to liberal pundits. Members of Congress on the left wing of the Democratic Party, many of whom had supported Obama against Hillary in the 2008 primary campaign, expressed their outrage in a caucus conference call Saturday. Politico reported the complaint offered by one unnamed Democrat on that call: "They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress." Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who had been one of Obama's rivals for the 2008 nomination, said the attack on Libya "would appear on its face to be an impeachable offense," because the president hadn't sought congressional approval.

In an accusation reminiscent of the Bush era -- when the president was often accused of invading Iraq to take over that country's oil resources -- Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Ed Markey alleged similar motives for Obama's intervention in Libya. "We're in Libya because of oil," Markey flatly declared Monday in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "I think all Americans know why the president made this strike."

To paraphrase: it's not about Libyans; it's about me.

Posted by oj at March 22, 2011 5:17 AM
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