Obama's terrorism speech: seeing what you want to see | Glenn Greenwald

Some eager-to-believe progressives heralded the speech as a momentous change, but Obama's actions are often quite different than his rhetoric

The hallmark of a skilled politician is the ability to speak to a group of people holding widely disparate views, and have all of them walk away believing they heard what they wanted to hear. Other than Bill Clinton, I've personally never seen a politician even in the same league as Barack Obama when it comes to that ability. His most consequential speeches are shaped by their simultaneous affirmation of conflicting values and even antithetical beliefs, allowing listeners with irreconcilable positions to conclude that Obama agrees with them.

"This willingness to grapple with moral complexity has always been one of the things that Obama's admirers love about him, and even liberals who feel disappointed with his national security record still seem grateful for the change from George W. Bush. If we have to have an imperial president, their attitude seems to be, better to have one who shows some 'anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society' (as The New Yorker's Jane Mayer put it on Friday), rather than falling back on 'the secrecy and winking smugness of the past'. . . . .

"I am not particularly nostalgic for the Bush era either. But Obama's Reinhold Niebuhr act comes with potential costs of its own. While the last president exuded a cowboyish certainty, this president is constantly examining his conscience in public but if their policies are basically the same, the latter is no less of a performance. And there are ways in which it may be a more fundamentally dishonest one, because it perpetually promises harmonies that can't be achieved and policy shifts that won't actually be delivered.

[I]t really is sort of just a rebranding of the Bush era policies with some legalese that is very articulately delivered from our constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. But effectively, Obama has declared the world a battlefield and reserves the right to drone bomb countries in pursuit of people against whom we have no direct evidence or who we're not seeking any indictment against."

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