Prompted by Peggy Noonan's claim in The Wall Street Journal that "we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate," Andrew Sullivan steps forward to defend Pres. Obama's honor. "Can she actually believe this?," he asks incredulously. "Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US' credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?"
An Obama critic, having overplayed her hand, gave Sullivan an opening to respond with what amounts to, "It isn't as bad as Watergate, nor as bad as George W. Bush." Let's concede those points. I don't much care what Obama's Republican critics say about him. The scandals they're presently touting, bad as two of them are, aren't even the worst of Team Obama's transgressions.
I have a stronger critique. Sullivan hasn't internalized the worst of what Obama's done, because his notion of scandal is implicitly constrained by whatever a president's partisan opponents tout as scandalous. If they criticize Obama wrongly, he defends Obama proportionately.
To see what he's forgotten as a result, let's run once more through the first questions in Sullivan's latest Obama apologia.
Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes?
Yes, President Obama has broken the law on multiple occasions. Despite clearly stating, in a 2008 questionnaire, that the commander-in-chief is not lawfully empowered to ignore treaties duly ratified by the Senate, Obama has willfully failed to enforce the torture treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and duly ratified by the Senate, that compels him to investigate and prosecute torture. As Sullivan put it earlier this year, "what Obama and Holder have done (or rather not done) is illegal."
Obama also violated the War Powers Resolution, a law he has specifically proclaimed to be Constitutionally valid, when committing U.S. troops to Libya without Congressional approval. Or as Sullivan put it in 2011, "I'm with Conor. The war in Libya becomes illegal from now on. And the imperial presidency grows even more powerful."
On the subject of war crimes, Sullivan wrote that "Obama and attorney-general Eric Holder have decided to remain in breach of the Geneva Conventions and be complicit themselves in covering up the war crimes of their predecessors - which means, of course, that those of us who fought for Obama's election precisely because we wanted a return to the rule of law were conned." In a separate entry, he went so far as to say that Obama is "a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more." That seems rather farther than Noonan went in her column.
Obama has not, as Sullivan points out, traded arms for hostages with Iran, or started a war with no planning for the inevitable occupation that would follow. But there are different questions that could be asked about Obama that would perhaps be more relevant to his behavior.
Has he ordered the assassination of any American citizens in secret without due process? Did he kill any of their teenage kids without ever explaining how or why that happened?
Has he refused to reveal even the legal reasoning he used to conclude his targeted killing program is lawful?
Has he waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers?
Has he spied on millions of innocent Americans without a warrant or probable cause?
Does he automatically count dead military-aged males killed by U.S. drones as "militants"?
Did he "sign a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects"?
There is more, as Sullivan knows, and it all amounts to a scandalous presidency, even if it happens that few Republicans care about the most scandalous behavior, and have instead spent almost a year* now obsessing about Benghazi. The IRS scandal and Department of Justice leak-investigation excesses are worrisome, but the biggest scandals definitely go all the way to the top, and are still largely ignored even by commentators who have acknowledged that they're happening. Sullivan has noted the stories as they broke, and seemed, for fleeting moments, to confront their gravity, noting the violation of very serious laws, and even once stating that Obama deserves to be prosecuted! Yet in response to Noonan, he writes, "So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong." How inexplicably they forget.
And Sullivan is hardly alone. At the New York Times, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and beyond, exceptional journalists take great care to document alarming abuses against the rule of law, the separation of powers, transparency, and human rights perpetrated by the Obama Administration. On a given subject, the coverage leaves me awed and proud to be part of the same profession. But when it comes time for synthesis, bad heuristics take over. Confronted with the opportunism and absurdity of the GOP, Obama's sins are forgiven, as if he should be graded on a curve. His sins are forgotten, as if "this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong."
Yes. He. Has.
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*The article originally said "years." It only feels that way. Sorry for the error.
