It comes as no surprise that The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne isn’t a fan of conservatives or Republicans, but it is occasionally surprising how far he goes to distort their positions in support of the Lightbringer. In his most recent piece, he takes the GOP to task for, get this, lack of consistency in attacking President Obama.
“Leaders do not operate in a vacuum. When they make strategic adjustments, their opponents do, too. President Obama has prompted just such a pivot by Republicans.
They’re criticizing him not for the decisions he’s made but for the ones he hasn’t, and the ones he delayed. They are attacking him not as a liberal ideologue but as a man in full flight from any ideological definition. If they once said his plans were too big, they are now asking if he has any plans at all.”
That may be technically correct, but it is only the first of many logical errors Mr. Dionne makes throughout. There is a qualitative difference in the fields being discussed. It’s true that, since his election, Mr. Obama has come under criticism for his hard left domestic policies. He has also been roundly criticized for his lack of any coherent policy on the international front. Well, outside of his attempts to ostracize allies and kowtow to enemies, he hasn’t been able make heads or tails of what is happening outside of the domestic sphere. Even his latest move to provide a no-fly zone over Libya has contradicted every other move he has made.
Mr. Dionne then begins to call out potential GOP candidates by name, picking quotes to show attacks on the President. In doing so he show his condescension to those who disagree with him, singling out Mitt Romney for saying Mr. Obama’s Libya policy is nuanced and wondering what’s wrong with that. A note, E.J. “nuanced” means “I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to have a solid opinion”.
All of these are only fun little tidbits until we get to the big whopper in the middle. Mr. Dionne is either not paying attention to what his President has said and done or he’s willfully lying about it.
“They did so in response to Obama’s own moves since the 2010 election designed to place himself above partisan infighting in Congress and to cast him as a moderate, forward-looking, non-ideological voice trying to talk reason to politicians mired in the past’s unproductive bickering.”
This is the same President who when it came to negotiating with Republicans after the 2008 election famously told them the reason they should sign on to everything he wanted was because “I won.”
The fact is that his moves since the 2010 election have been to double down on health care reform, abrogate responsibility for upholding the law on social issues that he disagrees with, ignore court orders to resume drilling in the Gulf, oppose 2nd Amendment rights, etc. ad nauseam. The only proof that Mr. Dionne brings is Mr. Obama signing the lame duck session’s extension of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for extending unemployment benefits. This good will didn’t last long and was obviously the result of the shellacking that the Democrats took in the elections. But this single magnanimous act of Mr. Obama was enough, in the author’s eyes, to raise him to rarefied heights of extraordinary bipartisan wonder, a situation that the Republicans cannot abide. So, according to Mr. Dionne they have to pull every dastardly trick possible to cut him down from his moral ascendancy. They’ve done everything they can to “pull the president down from his Olympian perch.” No, that wasn’t my snark, those were the actual words Mr. Dionne used. Really. No joke.
So what did they do? They asked where he’s been. Why he hasn’t been engaging in, well, politics. Why he didn’t sound off on Social Security, Libya, radiation? I know, horrific.
Of course, to end it off, Mr. Dionne has to break out a poll to show that all is okay with the New, Improved Abstracted Obama, he’s leading an unnamed Republican in a theoretical Presidential race.
Ending on this note:
“It’s hard for the president to remain above the battle, even in a country that claims to despise Washington infighting.”
The President, until now, has not shied away from throwing himself into the political fray at every opportunity and in the most partisan ways possible. Suddenly he has nothing to say on the most contentious issues of the day. I know what conclusion I would arrive at, but then again, I don’t like Kool-Aid.
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