The most argumentative e-mail I receive of a political nature comes from folks who are (a) anonymous and therefore not to be taken too seriously for that reason alone and (b) of a mindset I can never quite understand. It's the notion that your guy is your guy 100% of the way. Whether it's Barack Obama or George W. Bush, he's always right and everything he does must be spun accordingly. Even when he says or does one thing, then does a one-eighty and says or does the opposite, he was right both times. In the extreme cases where some action is so egregious, so immoral or wrong-headed that it can't possibly be spun to support his flawlessness, then it was somebody else's fault…untrustworthy advisors, faulty intelligence, etc.
Not only did I not think Bush was right most of the time, I never even thought that those who argued that really believed it. If you were a Bush supporter, my heart goes out to you. It must have been rough to have to pretend that invading Iraq was a wise, good faith decision or that waterboarding isn't really torture or that cutting taxes for the rich would help and not hurt the lower and middle-class. I could never bring myself to do that with some of the things Bill Clinton did and now at certain actions of the Obama administration. One such is what's reportedly been happening with Bradley Manning, the soldier who was arrested and charged with passing classified info to Wikileaks.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald has been all over this as have many others placing principle over partisan loyalty. Basically, Manning is being abused in a Marine Corps jail in Virginia, the goal apparently being to beat him down emotionally to the point where he'll confess to everything and anything. The man may well be guilty and he may well be deserving of long-term incarceratation…but as many of us said when the Bush administration was torturing human beings, this is not the kind of thing America is supposed to be doing. This is the kind of thing that when other countries do it, we declare them uncivilized and speak of how much better we are than that. If there is really a mountain of evidence against Manning as we've been told there is, we don't need to physically and mentally brutalize someone to obtain a conviction. And if there isn't a mountain of evidence against him…well, maybe he's, y'know, innocent?
In any case, in the American system of justice, the punishment is supposed to come after the conviction, not before. I'm very disappointed that Obama has allowed this to happen and is making no efforts to stop it.