Not for the first time, I’m gonna outsource to Mr. Charles P. Pierce:
… [T]he hour-long address was as good an example of a president’s walking a tightrope as you ever will see. Implicit in the speech was the undeniable truth that the country and its politics and, yes, its people were complicit in the last decade of producing a reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 about which the country and its politics and, yes, its people are now in the middle of profound second thoughts…
…Let us be honest with ourselves as a political people. Had Barack Obama… run for president by divesting himself fully of the prevailing momentum from that rage and that fear that still existed in 2008, then he every likely would not have found enough people in this country to vote to make him president. We are the people who strung the tightrope on which he now walks, and on which every president after him will walk as well. That’s why half the speech defended what he’d done, while the other half tried to define the limitations of what he can do…
We will never elect a president on a platform that he will weaken the office, and that also means giving back powers only recently acquired and exercised. If that were the case, then George W. Bush would have been a one-term president. The speech today was probably the best for which we could hope. What was even more clear is that he has no intention of letting Congress off the hook, either…
And I would really like to believe that Dave Weigel is right about his final point:
… We have a divided government; Congress holds the purse strings; Congress passed the 2001 Authorization of Force in Iraq. But most discussion of foreign policy focuses on the president, the commander-in-chief. Why didn’t he close Gitmo, like he promised? Is he saying he and he alone can kill citizens with drone attacks?
At four moments in his speech today, the president pointed at Capitol Hill and asked it to move on or admit its role in the security decisions that have become so controversial…
4. “Given my Administration’s relentless pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened. Today, I once again call on Congress to lift the restrictions on detainee transfers from GTMO.”
Translation: The Gitmo debacle is on you. You ground me down in 2009, promising to block funding and locations for prisoner transfers, before turning around and attacking me for breaking a campaign promise.
Also, if Medea Benjamin just knew when to quit, she’d be a national treasure instead of an embarrassment to the rest of us on the Left and a bottomless source of entertainment to the Reicht.
Your opinions?