One has to think that the libertarian Obamanistas — libertarians who supported Obama, thinking that he couldn’t spend more money than the Republicans, and would at least end the war on terror and dramatically reduce the military posture of the country, must feel some uncertainty about their guy.
Certainly, in terms of spending and deficits, he makes Bush look like a fiscal hawk. In his two years in office, Obama’s yearly deficits have been over four times the size of Bush’s largest. And in terms of state control of the economy — the socialization of the medical system, the nationalization of the auto industries, the massive increase in regulations, the dramatic increase in the size of the federal bureaucracy, and the expansion of environmentalist hegemony over natural resources — he has explored a whole New Frontier of statist economics.
As to the war on terror, he hasn’t ended it, or even diminished it appreciably, much less brought in a new era of isolationism. We are still in Iraq — though scheduled to exit, but no earlier than Bush’s plans called for — and are fairly well stuck in Afghanistan. Virtually all of Bush’s executive orders on the war on terror remain essentially unchanged.
A recent Reuters report (Jan. 7) underscores this point. While Obama was in the Senate, then on the campaign trail, then during his first two years in office, he relentlessly bashed Bush for holding prisoners outside the regular court system, detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Obama promised to give the Gitmo detainees fair trials in our regular court system, though he also promised they would all be convicted and jailed — well, indefinitely!
But quietly, on a Friday when news coverage is guaranteed to be minimal, Obama signed a law that prohibits bringing the remaining 175 Gitmo prisoners here for court trials.
He said he had no choice but to sign the bill — the defense authorization act for fiscal 2011 — because the military funding was necessary, even though the bill contained that provision banning domestic civilian trials for the terrorist detainees. And he vowed to fight to get the provision repealed — although the ban was put in the bill by one of the most left-wing Congresses in American industry, so it is hard to see why he thinks he can get it through a more right-wing Congress.
Obama’s claim that he had to sign the bill is just a lie. He certainly could have vetoed it and made it clear to Congress that he would not sign any future bill that included the provision. But he didn’t, and this raises a dilemma about him.
Perhaps he still wants to give the Gitmo guys domestic civilian trials, and has merely decided that trying those prisoners here would be too politically costly. Certainly, the public opposes such trials by a large margin. But if that is the case, he is not much of a man of principle.
On the other hand, perhaps he has changed his mind on the matter, and no longer views such trials as worthwhile. After all, the showpiece of the Obama policy of domestic civil trials for terrorists was the trial of Ahmed Ghailani, the Gitmo guy who was involved in the 1998 bombings of US embassies. The trial ended late last year with the jury finding Ghailani not guilty on 279 of the 280 counts Obama’s Justice Department brought against him, finding him guilty on only one count: planning to destroy US property. He was not found guilty of even one of the 224 murder counts against him. Hardly bracing for the prospect of keeping the other Gitmo guys safely away from society.
However, if Obama has changed his mind, what does that say about his judgment — compared to, say, George Bush’s?
