Conservative Donnybrook

Break out the clozapine. If the comments to Jim Geraghty’s recent NRO post are any indication, the GOP has a bad case of schizophrenia. The post contrasts President Obama’s recent vow that the use of American ground troops in Libya was “absolutely” out of the question against the reality that air campaigns frequently require boots to hit the ground if only to mount rescue missions. The GOP seems to be of two competing minds about Obama’s latest military adventure.

The first group emphasizes the politics of the action. Because it is Barack Obama driving the bus, these Republicans object. The point is that whatever he does, he must be criticized – even if the thing he does is precisely what George W. Bush would have done. Representative of this group is the following comment:

Would it have been to difficult for him to go to congress with a request or perhaps grace us with his presence with a primetime presidential address? George W had 42 nations behind him when he went into Iraq, he had a clear mission and UN support. He addressed the nation and got approval from BOTH dem and rep in the congress. This guy has NO IDEA what he’s doing and couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag with a flashlight. We are empowering terrorist by appearing weak and undisciplined. He is a fool and making the United Staes look foolish.

The other camp, however, looks beyond the politics of the moment and sees that Obama’s administration is, in many ways, simply a continuation and amplification of Bush’s administration. Representative of that strain of thinking are the following two comments:

Please don’t oppose Obama when he is doing the right thing just because he is Obama. The US is currently preventing Gaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of his “disloyal” citizens. If the US were not doing this, we would be bystanders to Stalinist butchery in a country where we could EASILY stop it. And we are easily stopping it at a cost of zero lives and $.5-3 billion. I’m as conservative as they come, but I will not follow NRO in unthinkingly bashing Obama over petty political points like “he promised no ground troops in Libya, but theres marines off the coast just in case. Flip flop!”. This is the kind of petty posturing and game playing that makes politics so unpleasant.

and

JG,

I agree with Ron – there is not much of a story here and it just makes you look bad to gin up something factually empty just so you have a blog post for the day/hour/minute.

You are almost always better than this.

It makes us conservatives look bad when we posture for purely political reasons (what are we, liberals?) – ie, carping about actions (Libya) that many/most of us are actually in favor of…

This empty, mewling rhetoric about one of the rare times Obama has acted correctly (if belatedly) has become the conservative version of PC – feigned virtue wounded.

Please stop it.

Elsewhere (and I can’t find the comment again or I’d link to it), I found one who synthesized his schizophrenia by criticizing President Obama for failing to prosecute the military adventure as well as President Bush would have (i.e. not enough troops, no coherent plan, etc.). All we know is Obama is wrong. It’s just not as clear exactly why.

Maybe after a round of clozapine, the GOP will come to its senses and realize that all of our military adventures have been ill-conceived whether prosecuted by a guy with an R after his name or a D. And that both houses could stand to have plagues afflict them.