Partisans vs Liberals

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There are liberals:

Personally, I think all presidents have too much power over life and death in this American Empire. But I really don’t trust presidents who create new powers to torture, kidnap and kill civilians with no due process and no accountability out of whole cloth. Bush did all that. As far as we know, Obama isn’t doing the torturing and kidnapping, but eliminating two out of three is hardly virtuous. He’s doing exactly what Bush did by issuing secret memos giving him extra-judicial powers, this time to draw up lists of humans to be targeted by drone planes — and he gave himself the power to order the murder of American citizens with no due process at all. That’s new. Very new. I think if anyone had blind faith in the president’s judgment that fact should make them take their blinders off.

via Hullabaloo.

and there are partisans:

Their protocol, their judgement. So yeah, I feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to speak, is President Obama. That’s not to say that again the process shouldn’t be codified, that there shouldn’t be oversight. But really, is our standard so low that we would only grant powers to the executive that we would trust in the hands of a man who misled the nation into a war we never should have been involved in? What would George W. Bush do? That’s our standard? We would never allow a power to the presidency that we wouldn’t feel comfortable giving to George W. Bush? I think we can raise the bar a little bit from that. For a little perspective lets keep in mind that the president does have the unilateral power to drop nuclear bombs and destroy the whole planet. Do you feel the same about George W. Bush having that power as President Obama? Call me a hypocrite but I sure don’t.