Hypocrisy Olympics on Libya
We always knew that partisanship was an ideal petri dish for the flowering of hypocrisy, but the ongoing debates about U.S. intervention in Libya have provided such heavy doses that to not notice would indicate, well, hypocrisy about hypocrisy.
From Republicans and many conservatives: Having consistently comdemned the post-Vietnam War Powers Act as an unconstitutional attempt by Congress to infringe on the prerogatives of the President, when Republicans now gravely cite the Act as evidence of President Obama’s supposedly out-of-control foreign policy, it not only strains credulity, it strains the ability of my stomach muscles to cope with the breathless guffaws that ensue. The truth is that the original Republican position that the War Powers Act is at most unconstitutional and at a minimum completely unenforceable (the courts will always refuse to enforce it because it is a political question (and most often a partisan question, as now) rather than a legal question).
From Democrats and many progressives: Having claimed that military action intended to produce “regime change” against a ruthless Cold War-era dictator who brutalized and murdered his own people named Saddam Hussein and undertaken only after congressional authorization was “warmongering” and even “war crimes,” many progressives now claim that military action intended to produce “regime change” against a ruthless Cold War-era dictator who brutalized and murdered his own people named Moammar Gadhafi and undertaken without congressional authorization is “humanitarian action.” The contortions, selective re-readings of history, hair-splitting, and throwing-dust-in-the-air recitations of attacks on the other side’s motives that are being generated by some very authoritative representatives of modern progressivism to try to explain away this inconsistency are equally laugh-inducing as the Republican variety.
But try as they might, the hypocrites selling the turned-on-a-dime memes about Libya themselves only get the silver medal. The gold medal winners are the partisan commentators on cable and the partisan bloggers who gleefully chortle at the hypocrisy of the other side but who maintain a relentless code of silence about their own. They win the gold because not only are they themselves being hypocritical about Libya, but also hypocritical about the hypocrisy that infests partisan competition these days.
It’s shameful.
The idea that “politics stops at the water’s edge” was probably never true, certainly has not been true since the Vietnam era, and was reduced to a pipe dream after 2003. But the growing practice of actually changing principles about foreign policy just to turn whatever the latest military conflict is into not only a partisan football but an over-the-top claim of “war crimes” and demands for impeachment is becoming both disgusting and dangerous. It is certainly not true that any disagreement or dissent about foreign policy endangers national security. But it is true that a systematic and bipartisan practice of subordinating actual national security debate to partisan warfare does.
