They’re Adding Up: Obama’s Failures in Leadership

It’s happening more frequently now. Those liberal pundits – except for their ageism, sexism, misogyny, etc. – are drowsily awakening from the euphoria of their infatuation with Barack Obama to see that he’s mortal after all and actually may not be offering effective leadership on a few important issues such as gun control and prosecuting war criminals in the Bush Administration.

E.J. Dionne’s column today is titled Who Will Face Down the Gun Lobby? Dionne Writes:

In other words: Our president can deal with all manner of big problems, but the American gun lobby is just too strong to let him push a rational and limited gun regulation through Congress.

It's particularly infuriating that Obama offered this statement of powerlessness just a few days before today's 10th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado -- and just after a spree of mass homicides across the United States took the lives of least 57 people.

Andrew Sullivan has the war crimes issue:

And so Obama's refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture's cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.

America becomes a banana republic.