Douthat's discontinuities

Ross Douthat's column this morning is both a daylight partisan hijacking and a clumsy, cover-of-night attempt at credit-fraud. He opens:

For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era.

This is by now an old conservative tale. Once Obama distinguished himself in the field of foreign affairs and failed to run up a white flag of surrender to swarthy terrorists, as the fearmongers predicted, conservatives began charting the striking "continuity" between this administration and Bush's winding trails of incompetence and extensive legacy of disasters. Douthat sketches his version of continuity, which, if you haven't already, you really should read. Here's mine, redrawn from Douthat's.

Obama ended our military mission in Iraq. Bush didn't.

Obama is poised to reduce our present military commitment in Afghanistan, an accelerated buildup because of Bush's reckless drawdown.

Obama officially ended the practice of torture, Bush's stain on America's honor.

Obama tried his damnedest to close Guantánamo, another neoconservative stain. Bush foolishly opened it and in time sat and wrung his hands over closing it, finally -- and characteristically -- leaving the headache to someone else.

Obama's Predator strikes in Pakistan have killed scores of terrorists with little to no political fanfare. Bush would have paused weeks at a time to takes bows.

Obama punctually withdrew the US as a principal player in NATO's Libya campaign. Bush never could have; his swagger wouldn't have allowed it. 

Obama made it a priority to locate and kill Osama bin Laden. Bush didn't.

Douthat encourages us to "look at the reality. For most Democrats, what was considered creeping fascism under Bush is just good old-fashioned common sense when the president has a 'D' beside his name."

It's true, Mr. Douthat, that common sense, post-Bush, has played a role. But mostly just good old-fashioned competence has distinguished Obama's foreign policy. And at the mere mention of "competence," one loses all underlying traces of continuity with the Bush administration.

Comments

[Alli]

bam!

[nitpicker]

Uh..."(The Libyan No-Fly Zone) is an intervention straight from Bill Clinton’s 1990s playbook, in other words, and a stark departure from the Bush administration’s more unilateralist methods." - Ross Douthat, March 20, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/opinion/21douthat.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[Charlieford]

Expect it. This is the centerpiece of the Republican playbook since the late 1940s. After having been roundly repudiated on domestic policies in the 1930s, Republicans finally stumbled upon their solution: Democrats fail on foreign policy. That won them the White House in 1952, and they'll never give it up. So, Obama's success is really that of the Bush administration; the Lebanon suicide bombing of 1983 was, on the other hand, really Carter's fault. And so it goes.

[Hackjob]

Obama did not try to close Gitmo in any meaningful sense, or he would have. Likewise indefinite detention. We are drone attacking Libya and the drone attacks in Pakistan HAVE caused major political problems, just not here, not yet.

Obama makes mistakes too, to be sure.

[Dorothy Rissman]

hackjob, I will give you the drone attacks in Pakistan, but the rest of your story is not accurate.

Have you written your senators to explain to them how angry you are that Gitmo has not been closed? It is Obama's fault that every single senator voted to keep gitmo open? Bernie Sanders played chicken on this issue too. Also, they all voted against Obama when he tried to buy a prison in Illinois.

The Dems in the senate were too worried about their own careers. They obvious choose to keep their seats rather than do the ethical thing.

[avoidswork]

Finding credibility in a Douthat article seems inherently pointless. Thus, unsurprised he missed the mark in yet another one of his columns.