Bloomberg deputy to Rand Paul: Hey, the people trust Obama to do the right thing on drones

Another good one via Mediaite. If you’re wondering why you should care what a deputy nanny of NYC thinks about drones, do note that Wolfson was a Clinton flack for years. He was a major player in Hillary’s 2008 campaign and might very well end up in a top position should she run in 2016, with a White House advisory role to follow if she wins. He may, in time, have the president’s ear on things like this. That’s a person whose thoughts on summarily liquidating Americans suspected of terrorism are worth paying attention to.

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In case you missed this post two days ago, don’t be so quick to conclude that he’s wrong:

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The public gets more reluctant as you start talking about targeting Americans and giving the president unilateral power to do it, but there’s already close to majority support for killing a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil in the abstract. Imagine what those numbers would look like in a concrete case once the Democratic/media message machine went to work on Obama’s behalf. Imagine he ordered a strike on an American-born bad guy hiding in a U.S. safe house whom the CIA had reason to believe was plotting, say, an attack on airliners. Do you suppose his approval rating would go up or down once the “NEW 9/11 PREVENTED” headlines started rolling out?

What’s newsworthy about this clip isn’t Wolfson’s gauge of public opinion, it’s his dismissive disdain for a guy like Paul who’s making precisely the sort of constitutional objections that would have made him a hero to the left during the Bush era. There is a way to pay lip service to liberal counterterrorism concerns circa 2006 while also doing your Democratic duty as a mindless partisan in defending Obama. He could say that Paul’s points are well taken, that he’s certainly right that we can’t ignore due process just to make things a bit easier for the president, but that in an age of terror the commander-in-chief must have the power to blah blah blah etc. You don’t get any of that here even though Wolfson’s on MSNBC, ground zero for Democratic civil-libertarian posturing during the Bush years. He feels perfectly comfortable telling a lefty audience flat out that Rand Paul’s a crank for worrying about the Constitution when everyone knows that the public trusts the guy who commands the military to do the right thing on assassinating citizens. Good work, guys.

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David Strom 6:40 PM | April 18, 2024
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