Personality-wise, I say Hillary Clinton is more Nixonian than anyone else we’ve seen recently.
I’m generally a lefty and a fan of women, but I really don’t want her as President.
Either Obama or Romney would have been better. (Of those two, meh, I’ll take Obama.)
Nixon was paranoid and felt persecuted because he thought powerful, well-connected people hated him. That drove him to do some terrible things. Based on his comfort with (for example) the intelligence bureaucracy and bankers, I don’t think Obama works that way. Most of this discussion is ‘I don’t like Obama, therefore he’s like someone else I don’t like.’
Yes, if you ignore all the details, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and some drone strikes are sort of similar to the Paris peace deal and Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia.
Obama may not be corrupt himself, but he’s surrounded by a lot of very questionable people. If he’s ignorant of their doings, it’s almost certainly willful ignorance. For example, we now know that it was several IRS offices that were harassing conservative groups (not just the Cleveland office), and that the harrassment started in 2010, but the surge in Tea-Party-esque groups didn’t happen until 2011. It’s almost beyond question that the upper levels at the IRS must have known what was going on. The DOJ journalist probe must have green-lighted at the top levels of government; it’s simply not plausible that it wasn’t. If Obama didn’t know about this stuff, it’s because he’s actively sticking his head in the sand.
Also, while Obama may not be able to close Guantanamo on his own authority, he sure as shit could order them to stop torturing people if he wanted to. And then there’s the drone strikes, which are after all nothing more than high-tech assassinations, which can and often do kill innocent civilians.
Frankly, the best comparison might be to one of the presidents of Israel, whose philosophy seems to be, “I’m going to do what needs to be done, and if innocent people get trampled, then it sucks to be them.”
He did.
The President doesn’t actively manage the IRS.
In fact, they sort of stay away from it to an extent.
I’m not saying he’s blameless.
But to me it sounds like the IRS self-targeted at these people and didn’t tell anyone outside their circle.
You have complained before about sensitive information being put out into the open. Now the DoJ is investigating who leaked information that is damaging to our national security, but you find another way to blame Obama for something. Even one respected journalist is telling people in his profession to get a grip.
Furthermore, you previously defended the Bush Administration’s firing of US Attorneys which the DoJ’s Inspector General found to be “abitrary, fundamentally flawed,” and inappropriate and unjustified to boot. But you said Democrats are “making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Based on your own posts, I believe you’re just looking to complain about Obama, regardless of the substance. Why should we take any of your partisan comments seriously?
Yeah, the DOJ journo probe is almost as stupid a scandal as umbrellagate. How dare the government trace leaks of sensitive information? Next thing they m,ight be prosecuting spies or something!
Tracing leaks is appropriate and it’s to be expected. They’re being overzealous about it.
How so?
Bob Shrum made the Carter comparison in today’s op-ed.
They’re being overly broad in their searches, and my understand is that they’re not supposed to go on fishing expeditions like this- they’re supposed to review these kinds of records only if they know what they’re looking for. The fact that they went through months of phone records and emails and even labeled the Fox reporter as an unindicted co-conspirator (and then didn’t pursue charges) suggests they were casting the widest net they could and hoping they’d stumble across something. That’s not how that is supposed to work.
So what? Republicans have been comparing Obama to Carter since before he even took office, and Shrum never met a campaign he couldn’t lose.
It’s on a different case, but did you read the article I linked to earlier (see “respected journalist”)? That doesn’t sound like a fishing expedition at all.
It’s more “I don’t like Obama, therefore he’s like someone else that people generally agree is unlikable.”
It’s a terribly lame attempt to elicit equivalence.
That sounds better targeted, and it also does explain why the North Korea leak was an issue in the first place. With regard to the AP investigation he neglected to mention the fact that while there was a national security issue, the government had told the public there weren’t any known terrorist plots related to the Bin Laden anniversary- and that wasn’t true. Even if that’s not whistleblowing, it’s significant news.
Actually, I seem to have made a mistake. You said that the government targeting of a Fox News journalist was wrong. I now believe that you were referring to Fox correspondent James Rosen.
The article I linked to is, in fact, about the same journalist, James Rosen. So when you say that my article on James Rosen better explains why he was targeted, and that the targeting is perhaps reasonable, it sure sounds like you changed your mind on whether Rosen was unfairly targeted. Is that the case?
I was commenting on the Justice Department collecting phone records related to several Associated Press reporters and Rosen (and some of Rosen’s emails).
I didn’t say anything about unfair targeting. I said the investigations were unreasonably broad, and maybe that’s not the case for Rosen.
First of all, I’ve never seen a conservative talk about Reagan that way so thanks for the new experience.
Second, I don’t think Obama needed to be told about this, because it’s a policy/procedural issue that can be handled at a much lower level than POTUS. Sure, there are concerns about how it looks, but I still believe (counter to evidence admittedly… 
)that the POTUS’s job involves “optics” only tangentially. He can delegate that.
Could you name a few, and tell us what makes them ‘very questionable people’?
Hey, has anyone mentioned that they both had funny middle names? And that their middle names, and last names, had the same number of letters? And that their first and middle names had the same number of syllables? And they both graduated from law school? And both of them got married and had two daughters?
The parallels are just overwhelming, I tell ya. 