Hey, who isn’t these days?
Veteran liberal media observer Jeff Jarvis, briefly a 9/11 hawk, has second thoughts about Barack Obama:
As an American often abroad, I am embarrassed by the damage you have caused to our reputation and to others’ trust in us. I find myself apologizing for what you are doing to citizens of other nations, dismissing the idea that they have rights to privacy because they are “foreign”.
As an internet user, I am most fearful of the impact of your wanton destruction of privacy and the resulting collapse of trust in the net and what that will do to the freedom we have enjoyed in it as well as the business and jobs that are being built atop it.
And as a Democrat, I worry that you are losing us the next election, handing an issue to the Republicans that should have been ours: protecting the rights of citizens against the overreach of the security state.
Don’t know much about history.
But beyond that, who could have seen this coming? As Kathy Shaidle wrote in October of 2004:
On Sept 11, 2001, I didn’t know the difference between The National Review and The New Republic, I’m ashamed to say. I went on the web looking for information, “solidarity”, whathaveyou, and discovered, pretty haphazardly, folks like Christopher Hitchens, Jeff Jarvis, Ken Layne, Andrew Sullivan…
All of whom have now declared themselves for Kerry. Even Glenn Reynolds has been wobbly. I don’t know why I say “even”; as one blogger has pointed out, much of this wobbliness seems generational.
God love him: Jarvis has literally walked through Manhattan covered in human ashes, and is such a booster of blogs, and seems such a nice fellow. But at the end of the day, he’s a Boomer. And he and his liberal cohort are convinced Bush is gonna make anal sex illegal or something, so… Kerry it is!
Whatever happened to all the “war liberals” and “bellicose women” and “anti-idiotarians”? I guess all that was just another one of their little fads.
Is this really a generational thing? Not if we include Sullivan.
As I wrote in 2010:
Flash-forward to today, replace the dull, lifeless Kerry with the inspiring (in theory, if not in practice) but equally leftist Barack Obama, and you can see this same formula playing out in Michael Totten’s interview with Paul Berman, the author of a new book titled, The Flight of the Intellectuals. Berman seems to be on the cusp of understanding what former President Bush accomplished in the Middle East, and what President Reagan accomplished in Eastern Europe, and Central America. But then those same mental blinders go back up at the thought that, to paraphrase the title of Harry Stein’s book last year, I Can’t Believe I Might Have To Say Nice Things About A Republican!
And speaking of the Flight of the Intellectuals, At City Journal, Benjamin A. Plotinsky explores “The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm,” noting “The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience.”
Oh, and if “liberals” are upset these days with President Obama, they likely would have had similar buyers’ remorse over [shudder] President Kerry and his hatred of new (read: decentralized) media — making him very much simpatico ideologically with his boss.
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