Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:25:31 AM
Let us look at two presidencies and ask why they get such different treatment:
First, a president who has allowed our intelligence service to monitor international calls without a warrant provided those calls include a foreign party who is a known or suspected terrorist. He allowed the jailing of terrorists captured in foreign conflicts in military prisons and had them tried by military tribunals rather than civilian courts. All of this, of course, taking place during a congressionally approved war.
Second, a president who appointed his brother Attorney General, used wiretaps on suspected crime figures without a warrant, used the FBI to assemble dossiers on his political opponents, planned the assassination of a foreign leader, and recruited, trained and then abandoned refugees in an attempt to overthrow a foreign government with which we were not at war. All of this occurring during a time at which we were officially at peace.*
It would seem that anyone who objected to the first would be even more offended by the second. But, as should be obvious, that is not the case.
The first, obviously, is the left's favorite demon, President George W. Bush, the man whose presidency is constantly depicted as "destroying America". The second is the left's secular saint, President John F. Kennedy, whose presidency is always described in glowing terms by the press, often using the word "Camelot", and whose family the press often describes as "American royalty".
Of course this should come as no surprise. The left's offense is always very selective. While our current president is criticized for any perceived human rights violation, or for any military efforts, the left conveniently forgets the infractions by, not just Kennedy, but any Democrat. Bush's "failure" in Iraq was not matched in the past by any mention of Carter's fiasco in the Iranian Desert. Bush's "unconstitutional" phone monitoring did not have any parallel in the handling of Hillary Clinton's "missing" FBI files. Bush's firing of US attorneys was "unconscionable", Clinton's was not even noticed, despite the fact that some were actually investigating Clinton at the time.
Apparently, when a Democrat enters office, the ACLU schedules a 4 year holiday, with the possibility of a 4 year extension.
My only hope is that President McCain** seems far enough left that the ACLU makes a mistake and gives him a pass too. Maybe we can finally win the war on terror.***
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* It just struck me while writing this, but in their habits of appointing family members and other unqualified friends to high positions, their abuse of police powers to harass opponents, and their penchant for cloak and dagger scheming, both Clinton and Kennedy resembled nothing so much as third world dictators. Not the military junta type, but the Chavez type, those who just managed to get a former democracy to vote themselves out of existence. That may make for an interesting future essay as well.
** I don't like saying it either, but it gives me fewer chills than "President Hillary" or "President Obama".
*** Well, unless President McCain sabotages himself, as he seems to be doing on the water boarding question, After all, who needs the ACLU when your president runs to their left?
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UPDATED 02/15/2008
Just to show that I am fair, I did find
an article by a liberal which presents a refreshingly clear and honest evaluation of JFK. The focus of the article is actually Obama, but it is nice to read a liberal saying many things I have said about Kennedy. True, he still does not bring up Kennedy's rather questionable civil rights record (outside of his lack of support for named civil rights bills), fails to mention his rather suspect monitoring of political rivals and his pursuit of "organized crime", which he conducted without the usual legal niceties upon which liberal seem to insist (at least from Republicans), but other than that, it is a remarkably lucid evaluation of JFK:
J.F.K. was a mediocre President. For two and a half years his
position on civil rights was legalistic—he stood up for enforcing court
orders—until the dramatic images from Birmingham in May 1963 forced him
to describe the issue as a moral one. The civil-rights bill he then
introduced into Congress stood little chance of passing partly because
Kennedy was unwilling to spend the huge amount of necessary political
capital. For those who believe he was on his way out of Vietnam when he
was assassinated, how to explain the dramatic coup three weeks before
his death that overthrew the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and pulled the
U.S. ever deeper into the quagmire? Kennedy’s main domestic
accomplishment was a tax cut; his main foreign accomplishment was
avoiding nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba (his finest hour).
Kennedy was a supremely cool calculator of interest. Ironic
detachment was his strength, and his weakness. It made him less likely
than L.B.J. to have invested his ego and half a million troops in a
hopeless war. It also meant that he wouldn’t have staked his political
future on passing civil-rights and voting rights—victories that Johnson
correctly predicted would cost the Democrats the South for a generation.