Everything Is "Fine"

Trey Smith

More than two years after President Barack Obama blew his self-imposed deadline to shut down the extrajudicial prison at Guantanamo Bay, close observers and defense lawyers with clients making their way through the reformed military tribunal system say the public isn’t paying attention.

“I think what you’ll find is the interest in the process will never get back up again,” Bryan Broyles, the Pentagon’s deputy chief defense counsel at Guantanamo, told TPM. “It’s fatigue and the thought that ‘Well, it must be okay now because Obama said it’s okay.’”

Broyles and other observers believe that some policy changes instituted under the Obama administration would have sparked outrage if President George W. Bush was still in the White House. One change he said should have been “extremely alarming” to the legal community: the rule allowing death penalty defendants to plead guilty and still receive the death penalty.

“This is the only court in the United States where you can plead guilty and still be given the death penalty, and it’s just another sign that the system is not set up to give anyone a trial it’s set up to give someone what appears to be a fair trial with a predetermined result,” Broyles said.
~ from Guantanamo Lawyers: Obama Gets Away With Legal Moves Bush Wouldn’t Have by Ryan J. Reilly ~

Sadly, this is why it's bad public policy these days to elect the Democratic Party's candidate for President. What happened during the Clinton presidency is the same thing we're finding under Obama's watch: Liberals, not wanting to embarrass THEIR guy, sit on the sidelines and allow conservative policies to subvert the American landscape.

On so many issues, Obama has supported policies and initiatives that a Republican president would have been vilified for. If George W. Bush had announced that he had the right to target American citizens for assassination without any measure of due process, the liberal intelligentsia would have exploded. When it was Obama who made this announcement, most of that same intelligentsia publicly yawned (though, I'm sure, there was much gnashing of teeth in private).

While I personally do not think that Mitt Romney has a scintilla of a chance of defeating Obama in November, it would be better for this nation if he did. I do not say this because I think Romney would support better policies, but because a vocal opposition would arise from their self-imposed hibernation. As Romney continued with and tried to expand on decisions made by our current president, the same people who raised nary a peep during our first black president's reign would suddenly find their voices again.

In fact, until that day when a true progressive makes a viable run for the White House, it's just as well that the nation elects the more conservative candidate each time out. These pseudo-liberals -- Clinton and Obama -- literally are destroying us from the inside out!