Obama and his Incivil Critics

The incivility and name-calling by the talking heads and others on the right has to stop.

In a short six paragraph article of 442 words, they managed to call President Obama and his White House aides liars and cowards, and the American Civil Liberties Union others in the “civil liberties community” of being hypocrites.

This rant has to do with an Obama administration announcement last week that it does not need and would not seek new legislation to govern the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay. President Obama now claims that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force gives him the right to hold terrorists indefinitely without trial. “The White House and its allies,” we are told, “knowingly engage in a distortion,” and lack the courage to engage the Congress on what processes should be available to those subject to such detention.

Meanwhile, the response of the ACLU, which has consistently opposed any indefinite detention regime and pushed for detainees either to be charged in courts or released, has been “breathtakingly hypocritical.” They find it odd, “that the same policy which, when pursued by the Bush administration, constituted “thumbing its nose at the Constitution” and putting a “stain on America’s name at home and abroad” now elicits nothing but a few measured tsk-tsks.”

Well, alright, they didn’t exactly call President Obama a liar (he is merely “knowingly engaging in distortion”), they didn’t say he was a coward (merely that he “lacks the courage to engage”) and they didn’t call the ACLU and their allies “hypocrites” (merely that they are being “breathtakingly hypocritical”).

Oh, they aren’t really right-wing extremists, either. The authors of ” Mr. Obama Punts . . . ” just happen to be the editors of the Washington Post .