Sunday’s Washington Post has a short—short, but not short enough—editorial making snide fun of civil libertarians. In “Obama Punts,” the Post sneeringly takes the President to task for not seeking legislation that would enshrine the current despicable Bush-Obama policy of “preventive detention.” According to the Post, “Passing new legislation would have been difficult, and the president has other policy matters that command his attention. But rather than tackling hard questions as he pledged to do during his campaign, Mr. Obama in this instance has ducked them.”
But the Post reserves its full malice for “the left.” “If the administration’s abdication is irresponsible, the reaction of the civil liberties community has been breathtakingly hypocritical. The American Civil Liberties Union has consistently opposed any indefinite detention regime and pushed for detainees to be charged in federal or military courts or released. So we wouldn’t expect them to join us in criticizing Mr. Obama for failing to seek a new legal regime. But it is odd that the same policy which, when pursued by the Bush administration, constituted “thumbing its nose at the Constitution” and putting a “stain on America’s name at home and abroad” now elicits nothing but a few measured tsk-tsks.”
Yeah. As Glenn Greenwald points out, in a characteristically excellent post, “as a purely practical matter, nothing good—and plenty of bad—could come from having Congress write a new detention law. As bad as the Obama administration is on detention issues, the Congress is far worse.” Congress is indeed far worse than the Administration, which is precisely why the Post wants new legislation. We’ve got this brief, glorious fascist moment here! Let’s capture as much of it as we can, forever! Sorry, Washington Post. It isn’t the American Civil Liberties Union that’s been “breathtakingly hypocritical.” It’s you.
