In true Frank Drebin fashion, President Obama’s supporters are trying convince people not to pay any attention to the swirl of scandals surrounding his administration. Seth Mandel of Commentary turns his attention from the scandals to the president’s enablers.
With regard to the revelations that the IRS targeted President Obama’s critics in the nonprofit sector after Obama publicly harangued those nonprofits and his Democratic allies in Congress encouraged their investigation, Obama’s defenders warned conservatives that they were in danger of “overreaching.”
Having failed at that, the president’s defenders seem to be trying a new tack: use the news about President Obama’s expansion of the surveillance state, involving NSA cyber-snooping and the Justice Department’s unprecedented seizure of the phone records of journalists and their family members, to accuse Republicans of hypocrisy. Didn’t Republicans defend the Bush administration’s antiterror tactics, after all? But here, too, the left is running into some difficulty finding the hypocrites. Our own Max Boot has been clear on his support for the antiterror apparatus under both presidents. The Wall Street Journal has been flooding its op-ed page with editorials–sometimes more than one a day–supporting President Obama on the issue.
Most of the criticism coming from the right, in fact, is either from those who support the surveillance program but knock President Obama for his own hypocrisy–his defense of the NSA is precisely the “false choice” between our values and our security he disingenuously demagogued to gain his current office–or those who never support such surveillance, regardless of the party in power. …
… It turns out that the hypocrisy the left is looking for is coming from its own side, as would be expected. Two days after Amash tweeted his outrage, Neera Tanden, a former advisor to Obama now heading the liberal Center for American Progress, tweeted her own conflicted opinion about the snooping:
Re NSA, I do have a lot of faith in Pres Obama, so it does matter to me that he defends it. But I don’t have faith in all future Presidents
In another tweet, Tanden followed up on the thought by noting that while Obama uses these broad powers, he’s hoping to rein them in for future presidents, so people should stop giving him such a hard time. It’s actually somewhat uncomfortable to watch Obama’s defenders telegraph ahead of time exactly how they’ll reverse their supposed principles as soon as someone they haven’t worked for takes office.
