Quote Of The Day

Glenn Greenwald, concludes an article about U.S. Rep. Peter King, whose hysterical Islamophobia seems to have found common cause with President Obama:

Democrats are certainly right when they depict King as the embodiment of right-wing, neoconservative, Islamophobic radicalism. They should spend time wondering why he so often finds common cause with President Obama on the areas on which he most focuses. There are many things to say about bipartisanship in Washington: that it is tragically rare or that the GOP refuses to give Obama credit are most definitely not among them.

Obama defender Rep. Peter King

I've been both saddened and amused by Democrats' and progressives' characterization of King and other prominent Republicans on their often paranoid and bigoted ideas on foreign policy. Amused because, while those criticisms are usually true, the fact that these same Republicans basically agree with Obama Administration's "anti-terrorism" policy, despite the lawlessness and foolishness of it, is something these folks generally overlook. Saddened, because the real effect, if not the real purpose, of such biased criticism is to make these Republicans the boogeymen, and to imply that there's some difference between them and what the Obama Administration is doing right now. If you want to talk about bigotry and paranoia, what do you call a policy that basically says that anyone in Yemen, Pakistan, or whoever else we've decided is a haven for terrorists, attends the funeral of, or is standing anywhere near, a suspected terrorist, that these people must also be terrorists? If that strikes you as a balanced, considered policy, then I suggest you think long and hard about what people would say if some foreign government were doing that to us, regardless of the provocation.

As I mentioned in a previous QOTD, it's a rare prominent progressive who mentions that what the Obama Administration is doing here is both reckless and wrong. The list of prominent progressives who make the point that this is as bad as what the Bush Administration was doing is no longer.