But using Katrina as a point of comparison is excessive. Katrina was an example of government incompetence and indifference, all at once. Obama is neither incompetent nor indifferent. He is a centrist Democrat, one who brought in a record amount of Wall Street money during the campaign and, not surprisingly, a whole lot of Wall Street veterans with him into the White House. I find that many progressives who jumped on the Obama bandwagon early, selling him as the progressive candidate in the race contrasted with corporate sell-out Hillary Clinton are, like Huffington, among the most disappointed by the president. I was an Obama admirer but a skeptic, and I find I'm less chagrined about the ways he falls short of my ideals than the folks who swooned for him early.

The two most interesting pieces I've read on Obama's troubles this week avoid rhetorical excess and raise more questions than answers, but I recommend them anyway. On Salon, Michael Lind asked "Can populism be liberal?" and answered, maybe: But not as long as the Democrats are the party of Goldman Sachs. Like Huffington, he argues that Obama needs to focus on jobs to keep populist anger from being channeled by the opportunistic, solutions-free GOP. If you missed it, read it over this long weekend.

In his New Yorker blog, George Packer examined Obama's declining popularity and rising troubles at home and abroad, and, like me, argues that part of Obama's problem is the unrealistic expectations of many enthusiasts.  Packer adds this troubling observation:

The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because it began and ended with a person, not an issue. And it was unlike ordinary political coalitions because it didn’t have the organizational muscle of voting blocs. The difficulty in sustaining its intensity through the inevitable ups and downs of governing shows the vulnerability in this model of twenty-first-century, Internet-based politics.

Certainly Arianna Huffington didn't share an agenda with neoconservative Ken Adelman – but both endorsed Obama. Looking back on the unlikely coalition Obama assembled, at least partly because of the nation's economic collapse and the incompetence and corruption of the Bush administration, it shouldn't be surprising that he began to lose support once he had to actually govern.

I'm a little more patient with Obama because I never saw him as the great left hope, but I agree with liberal critics who want the president to deliver on Democratic ideals and focus on the many casualties of the economy. It's funny but with a Democrat in the White House, Matt Drudge is trumpeting what liberals have always talked about as the "real" unemployment rate – the unemployed plus the underemployed and those who've given up finding work – and it's over 17 percent. A third of all African-American men are jobless. Let's welcome the right's sudden focus on the casualties of the economy, and challenge them to come up with solutions. They won't, but Obama can and should.

On this Thanksgiving, I remain grateful Obama is in the White House. I'm thankful Dick Cheney is flapping his gums as a private citizen, not the most powerful man in the world. I believe in Obama's intelligence and decency. Like a lot of liberals, I believe he shares "our" values; I've just never been entirely sure he has either the political courage or savvy it takes to act on them, quite yet.

The real challenge is to show Obama and other shaky Democrats that there are political rewards for representing the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Too many politically conflicting interests got to say they elected Obama, and too many progressives jumped too soon to claim him as our own, without asking him to prove it. There's a lot of work left to do to save this country. Have a great holiday, and then let's get back to doing the work.

 

The Barack Obama of that Philadelphia speech would not have let his attorney general, Eric Holder, announce the new policy for trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 defendants in criminal court, as if this were a mere departmental issue and not one of momentous policy. And the Barack Obama of the speech would have enunciated a principle of law and not an ad hoc system in which some alleged terrorists are tried in civilian courts and some before military tribunals. What is the principle in that: What works, works?  Try putting that one on the Liberty Bell.

I point to this because it highlights an extreme logical fallacy coming from some Obama supporters ever since Holder announced the Guantanamo policy -- a fallacy that is the inevitable by-product of the administration's incoherent positions.  In order to defend Obama, it's necessary simultaneously to embrace these self-negating premises:

(1) The Rule of Law and our core political values require that terrorist suspects like Khalid Shiekh Mohammed be given trials (as Morrill put it:  "the Attorney General announced that the United States follows the rule of law");

(2) Obama is explicitly denying trials to many -- probably most -- of the Guantanamo detainees (as well as the "rendered" ones at Bagram), instead putting them before military commissions or, worse, indefinite detention with no charges;

(3) Obama should be praised as a courageous and principled leader because he's following the Rule of Law, which -- see #1 -- requires trials for terrorism suspects.

Isn't the core inconsistency of these premises obvious?  Even Richard Cohen can see it.  The administration's actual position -- we'll give trials to a handful of people we know we can convict and will continue to imprison them even if they're acquitted, while affirmatively denying trials to the rest -- is about as far from a principled or even cogent position as it gets.  Worse, it's impossible to defend Holder's decision to give a trial to Mohammed by appealing to "the rule of law" given that many of the detainees are being denied trials.  If (as Obama defenders insist) the "rule of law" requires trials, doesn't that mean, by definition, that Obama and Holder -- by using military commissions and indefinite detention -- are trampling on "the rule of law," not upholding it? 

To understand what has been happening with Obama's actions on the civil liberties front in general -- and how he came to embrace two core Bush/Cheney policies in particular (indefinite detention and military commissions) -- it's very worthwhile to read this new Time article by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf on how and why White House Counsel Greg Craig was pushed out of his position.  In essence, Craig was the voice inside the administration insisting that Obama adhere to his civil liberties campaign pledges and dismantle the Bush/Cheney apparatus that progressives (and Obama) long claimed to find so objectionable.  But once Obama decided a few months into his presidency that he would not do so, Craig became disfavored and then, finally, pushed out:

Interviews with two dozen current and former officials show that Obama's public decision to reverse himself and fight the release of the [torture] photographs signaled a behind-the-scenes turning point in his young presidency. Beginning in the first two weeks of May, Obama took harder lines on government secrecy, on the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and on the prosecution of terrorists worldwide. The President was moving away from some promises he had made during the campaign and toward more moderate positions, some favored by George W. Bush.  At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

Note how abandoning one's campaign promises and adopting Bush/Cheney detention and secrecy policies is now deemed "moderate" -- or, as the Time photo caption calls it, "pragmatic."  The White House began panicking as they were attacked by Dick Cheney and the Right for being "soft on terror," and the results were depressingly predictable:

Obama needed to regain control quickly, and he started by jettisoning liberal positions he had been prepared to accept -- and had even okayed -- just weeks earlier.  First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama sided against Craig again, ending the suspension of Bush's extrajudicial military commissions.  The following week, Obama pre-empted an ongoing debate among his national-security team and embraced one of the most controversial of Bush's positions: the holding of detainees without charges or trial, something he had promised during the campaign to reject. . . . The unseen struggle took place in the spring, but the results are emerging now. On Nov. 13, Attorney General Eric Holder unveiled plans to try Guantánamo Bay detainees in federal courts, as preferred by liberals, but he also announced he would try other suspected terrorists using extrajudicial proceedings out of Bush's playbook.  The Administration is preparing to unveil its blueprint for closing the prison, but Obama will do so using some of the same Bush-era legal tools he once deplored.

None of this will be news to anyone following Obama's relentless and continuous embrace all year long of many of the "counter-terrorism" policies of the Bush administration -- ones which both he and progressives once claimed to find so intolerable.  But particularly striking is this on-the-record justification offered by a White House spokesman:

The White House says Obama hasn't changed, just adjusted. "He and the Administration have adapted as we have learned more and the issues have evolved, but there has not been an ideological shift," says spokesman Ben LaBolt.

By embracing and defending numerous Bush/Cheney policies he once deplored, "Obama hasn't changed, just adjusted."  He's learned secret things that he can't tell you about but which -- you should accept -- do justify his "adaptations."  Whenever Bush followers would run out of arguments to defend their leader's actions, that's the same rationale they'd resort to:   he knows secret things that you don't know and therefore we should trust him.   So Obama has "learned" things that caused him to abandon his vehement condemnations of indefinite detention, state secrets, military commissions and denial of habeas corpus as unjust and un-American travesties and come to embrace them as important and necessary policies?   Wow:  that must have been quite an education.  Don't he and his supporters owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a sincere apology for criticizing them all those years for these policies when, as it turns out, they were necessary and just all along?  And see this insightful argument that makes a related point.

So one of the very few pro-civil-liberties insiders with any power is now gone, replaced by a supremely partisan Washington insider with little apparent interest in those values.   One of Obama's most impressive and exciting appointments -- Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC -- has still not been confirmed despite a 60-seat Democratic Senate.  Instead, the former CIA official who defended so many of the Bush-era terrorism policies, John Brennan, remains as Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser.  And Rahm Emanuel -- he of the "build-power-by-increasing-Blue-Dogs" mentality and a driving force behind last year's Congressional enactment of telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping -- continues to consolidate power even in these supposedly non-political areas.  Given all of that -- and with the 2010 midterms approaching -- does anyone think these trends will improve rather than worsen?

Whether Obama has adopted every last radical Bush/Cheney terrorism policy -- he hasn't -- is not the point.  And the question of whether "Obama is as bad as Bush" -- he isn't -- is no more relevant than the excuse that Bush's torture program shouldn't be criticized because at least it never reached the level of Saddam's rape rooms and limb removals.  As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration.  And it's flatly inconsistent to invoke "the rule of law" to defend Obama's decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he's violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.

 

UPDATE:  The Nation's Jeremy Scahill reveals that the U.S. military is using Blackwater -- Blackwater -- as part of "a secret program in [Pakistan in] which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives."  McClatchy reports that Obama has made a decision to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan which, if true, means, as Juan Cole says, that "Gen. Stanley McChrystal has won the struggle for policy decisively."  

So, to recap:  we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus.  These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.

And if you haven't seen or read Bill Moyers' amazing -- and obviously relevant -- examination this week of how and why President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, I can't recommend highly enough that you do so.

 

UPDATE II: Nick Baumann of Mother Jones examines other aspects of the Time article that he calls "troubling," and makes some important points about what all of this reflects about Obama and his civil liberties commitments.

 

UPDATE III:  This new 7-minute video from Brave New Films and Robert Greenwald (no relation) synthesizes many of these issues, as it features interviews with Afghan citizens who were imprisoned with no charges and abused by the U.S. at Bagram for years.  I realize it's far more important to know what Les Gelb and the Brookings Institution think about such things, but every now and then it's worth hearing from Afghans about their own country, too.  In this case, their commentary about the impact of our detention policies and occupation is well worth hearing:

Statements like these are a dime a dozen in “Wiley World.” Political correctness isn’t a concern to Drake. And yet, his assertions about Muslims are far from his most controversial. What has garnered him the most media attention is what he said to national radio talk show host Alan Colmes in June. 

“Are you praying for his death?" Colmes asked Drake, referring to President Obama. "Yes," Drake replied. "So you're praying for the death of the president of the United States?" Colmes asked. "Yes." "You would like for the president of the United States to die?" Colmes asked once more. "If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that's correct."

Drake says he regrets the media frenzy caused by the Colmes interview, but he stands by his use of imprecatory prayer, a form of prayer he says is biblically mandated -- an appeal to God that is, unlike most prayers, a request not for something positive but for misfortune, a kind of curse meant to fall on those considered evildoers.

With his gray hair slicked back and a slightly pinkish complexion, Drake sported suspenders and glasses as he explained that his decision to use imprecatory prayers stemmed from a desire to better organize his early morning telephonic prayer meetings. Drake decided praying the Psalms would be one way of redirecting these sessions. But soon, he came to Psalm 109: “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

"That’s the one that got me in trouble," Drake says now.

The problem is that Drake began to recite this prayer, and others like it, while keeping certain people in mind. In the case of Psalm 109? President Barack Obama.

But Drake is far from alone in his use of imprecatory prayers. Pastor Steve Anderson of Faithful World Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., also incorporates this form of prayer in his worship. In fact, Frederick Clarkson of Religion Dispatches surmises that Anderson inspired one regular attendant of Faithful World Baptist, 28-year-old Chris Broughton, to show up to a speech by the president with two guns in hand when he issued the following sermon:

"You’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to pray for the socialist devil, murderer, infanticide, who wants to see young children, and he wants to see babies killed through abortion and partial-birth abortion and all these different things," Anderson said, referring to President Obama. "Nope. I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell."

There are other signs imprecatory prayer is growing in popularity. Beliefnet’s Rabbi Brad Hirschfield writes that Psalm 109 is now a top Google search; it’s even inspired a line of bumper stickers and T-shirts that sinisterly read “Pray for Obama,” while pointing to the Psalm, and in particular, the passage that calls for an end to present leadership, though Gawker recently noted that CafePress, popular purveyor of homemade T-shirts, has stopped selling the items.

But what is it, exactly, that unites people who pray for the death of the president?

Most likely, it's a rabid antiabortion stance. Drake "prayed" for abortion doctor George Tiller, and reacted to Tiller’s murder by noting that his death was an answer to those prayers.

Drake insists this isn’t as evil as it sounds.

"I’m not for a Christian or anybody killing somebody," he told me. "That’s God’s business."

Tiller’s death, then, according to Drake, must have been God’s will, and his prayers simply aligned with God’s providence.

When speaking about Obama, Drake often refers to "baby killing." Anderson is also pro-life. And both men believe homosexuality is a sin -- views that fit neatly into not only certain religious camps but political parties as well.

Anderson is a member of the Constitution Party, which is, according to its own site, the third largest political party in the United States in terms of voter registration -- a party that is pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay. The monthly newsletter, Ballot Access News, puts the party’s voter registration total at more than 400,000 or .44 percent. This is considerably less than the numbers Democrats, Republicans or Independents boast, but still greater than the numbers on record for the Libertarian Party or the Green Party. And Drake himself ran for vice-president of the United States on Alan Keyes’ 2008 ticket as a member of the American Independent Party, the California affiliate of the Constitution Party.

But aside from politics, there is the question of whether people who pray the Psalms in this manner stand on any kind of solid theological ground.

Stephen Chapman from Duke University’s Center for Jewish Studies says Jews and Christians inherited the tradition of imprecatory prayer from the Ancient Near East but used this form of prayer in a specific way: Imprecatory prayers were meant to remind the faithful of the covenant they held with God and the consequences that would follow if that covenant was broken.

Given the New Testament’s message of love and forgiveness, Christians in particular have struggled with what to do with the material ever since, says Chapman.

But Drake argues he’s in good company when it comes to imprecatory prayer. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin prayed this way, he says. Still, there have been other famous theologians, C.S. Lewis for one, who found these kinds of prayers distasteful. Present-day Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann has tried to find some kind of middle ground by arguing that the Psalms can serve as a kind of liturgical venting -- a psychological release from the pent-up anger and frustration life continually piles on us. 

The Southern Baptist Convention has distanced itself from imprecatory prayer, though Drake himself once served as the SBC’s vice-president; SBC president Dr. Johnny Hunt has called imprecatory prayer unbiblical. But this is where, in a sense, Drake is right and others are wrong. Prayers calling for the downfall of our enemies can be found in the Bible, there’s no arguing that. But the question is: What do we do with the text now? 

This isn’t an easy question to answer. Though Drake’s or Anderson’s actions may strike most of us as plainly and abhorrently wrong, same-sex marriage no doubt strikes Drake as decidedly wrong. That's yet another conviction upheld with the help of biblical text, and which is, no matter what fundamentalists argue, clearly open to interpretation. It’s a reality that not even historical context can save us from, and the danger that comes when considering a text as beautifully complicated as the Bible sacred. 

But discrediting people like Drake or Anderson should remain a priority, even for those of us who don’t believe in the power of prayer, because in these instances prayer is tantamount to hate speech -- an act of violence that the First Amendment makes difficult to do anything about in the United States. Drake has just recently lifted his call for imprecatory prayer against the president, but only because he wants Obama to live long enough to stand trial for treason. Drake continues to argue that Obama is not a U.S. citizen and that his claim to the presidency is illegitimate as a result. But Drake is no doubt using imprecatory prayers on others, and one look at the evidence screams he’s not alone.

Both videos are below.