How many more erstwhile apologists can President Obama lose before he's rendered little more than a figurehead?
Two more just joined the forlorn procession -- left-wing queen bee Arianna Huffington and disgraced former New York governor turned itinerant political commentator Eliot Spitzer. (Audio clips after the jump)
When she's not posting kitten videos and side-boob shots at The Huffington Post, Huffington clashes with Mary Matalin in "Both Sides Now," a weekly radio show moderated by attorney and NYC Democrat Mark Green.
In the most recent broadcast, Huffington showed that her days of swooning over Obama are long over (h/t, audio, Brian Maloney at mrctv.org) --
GREEN: Let's listen first to the president last Friday --
OBAMA: You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices.
GREEN: Arianna, why do you disagree with the Franken-Rove side that says, look, the NSA data trawling, with a probable cause warrant required for further investigation, is a necessary tool in a world of terror attacks against the US?
HUFFINGTON: Well, actually, we had a cover, 'George W. Obama,' where we see, you know, the far-reaching extension of what President Bush started in terms of the surveillance state under Obama. And the fact that many Democrats don't feel as worried because they trust Obama shows that blithe assurances that the government can be trusted because we like the person who's in the White House are absolutely meaningless. I mean, this is about principle. The president's statement that you played, that we can't have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience, is just absurd. I mean, we cannot have 100 percent security no matter what we do and clearly haven't had it. I mean, look at what has happened during the last few months.
Here's a clip of Eliot Spitzer on Bill Press's radio show saying Obama appears "weak and irresolute" for his shifting positions on the Syrian civil war (audio) --
PRESS: Can you remember when a president ever said we're going to get militarily involved in another country and he had a deputy, uh, deputy director of the NSA announce it?
SPITZER: You know, the problem that the president has on this one is that, first, he's been sort of making incremental tactical easy decisions or hard decisions but the small decisions along the way, he says Assad must go, this is genocide, there's a red line with chemical weapons. And yet each time that the red line is crossed, Assad is still there, chemical weapons we now acknowledge have been used, and we're sending them a few BB guns. And so, the reaction has not been commensurate with the magnitude of the violation on their part. And the reason they look, the president could very easily have said early on, this is a civil war which will have horrific consequences but it's not our battle, we cannot get pulled into it. If he had done that, then he would at least have had an articulable and consistent position and perhaps we would be looking on with horror but it wouldn't be, every time, now what are you doing, Mr. President?
PRESS: Right.SPITZER: Instead, by saying we're getting incrementally involved but we don't do anything, he's looking both weak and irresolute and it's a bad situation.
Put another way, Obama's been in over his head since day one and a growing number of liberals are belatedly starting to notice.
(Cartoon, SodaHead.com)
