When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? -- John Maynard Keynes
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Obama's biggest vulnerability is not Obamacare
Having listened to about as much of CPAC 2012 as I could stand, I can see why Obama stands a good chance of re-election. That's not to say the President's re-election is assured. He definitely has some problems, but his biggest vulnerabilities have nothing to do with Obamacare or the Catholic Church, but instead issues that are being raised mainly on the left:
(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; . . . . President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things. . . . . It isn't that I object to Sullivan backing Obama's reelection if his GOP opponent runs on bringing back torture. Is he the lesser of two evils? Maybe so. But lauding him as a president who has governed "with grace and calm" and "who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name"? If indefinite detention, secret kill lists, warrantless spying, a war on whistleblowers, violating the War Powers Resolution, and abuse of the state secrets privilege don't fit one's definition of "scandal," what does? If they're peripheral flaws rather than central, unacceptable transgressions, America is doomed to these radical, illiberal policies for the foreseeable future." (emphasis added)
And this is David Seaman, http://www.twitter.com/d_seaman ; Google+: http://profiles.google.com/dseaman, on the same issues: "What if we voted for Barack Obama, a rational moderate, and instead got one of the most irrational, secretive, and authoritarian presidential administrations of the past 100 years? What if Ron Paul and Buddy Roemer are right about the election process and about the erosion of our core civil rights? And what if Barack Obama truly DOES think the Constitution is an outdated joke?"
(David Seaman video)
If conservatives, and others, ever truly woke up to this, Obama might have a real problem being re-elected.
