My take on Obama's recent maneuvers

I think Mike Tomasky pretty much captures my feeling on some of Obama's recent security-related decisions:

Look, I won't defend Obama on this. When Obama does something I'm not crazy about, I don't recall having any trouble writing "I'm not crazy about" this. I don't disagree with him very often. But when I have I've said so. In this case, he's pretty obviously going in a direction not consonant with a lot of his campaign rhetoric.

At the same time, I've never been a civil-liberties absolutist. I'm not an absolutist about much of anything. Democracy is not a land of absolutes. Democracy is about balancing concerns and interests. Civil liberties aren't absolute, even in the land of the First Amendment. As the old cliché goes, you can't yell fire in a crowded theatre. The right to express an opinion is absolute, or awfully close to it. But there are other kinds of speech than opinionating speech.

My views are similar to those of former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming (a Republican, no less!) who said that civil liberties are not a slippery slope but rather a spiral staircase, each step of which must be trod with the agreement of the government and the public. My problem with a lot of the Bush-era abuses of power wasn't always the tactic involved, but rather that there was no debate, no congressional oversight, no judicial review--suddenly, we're just torturing people. I think torture is wrong, and I suppose I'm an absolutist on that. But I wasn't, for example, opposed to Obama's new stance on FISA during the campaign. We are, after all, in some danger. I think it's overstated, but I think that we will undoubtedly have to redraw some lines in order to stay safe. But this must be done in accordance with American values, laws, and in the view of the public.

So, yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with some of Obama's recent decisions. But looking at the broader picture, he's closing Guantanamo (somehow I doubt the pathetic Blue Dog resolution to stop it will go through), he's ended torture, and he's still going to end the Iraq War. I never thought Obama would be a true-blue liberal. I always thought he was an honorable and pragmatic person who would make the decisions that he thought were right, strategically and substantively. Only time will tell whether these decisions were correct.