Baseless Adoration

Apparently, many Obama supporters are complaining about the strict scrutiny the President is receiving from the progressive wing of his party. To highlight the cynicism of that position, Greenwald writes,

These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters:  are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid?  Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign?  Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against — from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions?  Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes?  Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN?  Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to “surge” in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam?   Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama’s detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned:  “Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House”?

Who knows?  Who cares?  According to these defenders, it’s just wrong — morally, ethically and psychologically — to criticize the President.  Thus, in lieu of any substantive engagement of these critiques are a slew of moronic Broderian cliches (“If Obama catches heat from the left and right but maintains the middle, he is doing what I hoped he would do (and what he said he would do) when I voted for him”), cringe-inducing proclamations of faith in his greatness (“I am willing to continue to trust his instinct, his grace, his patience and his measured hand”), and emotional contempt for his critics more extreme than one would expect from his own family members.  In other words, the Leave-Obama-Alone protestations posted by Sullivan are fairly representative of the genre.  How far we’ve fallen from the declaration of Thomas Jefferson:  “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

aided by the above video that reveals the shockingly scarce criteria behind Palin worship, almost as if to remind us of the inherent perils in the blind no-questions-asked presidential adoration so common during the W. Bush administration.