By SHERMAN FREDERICK
By SHERMAN FREDERICK
Stephens Media
It ain’t easy being liberal these days. You put your faith in the agenda of Al Gore and Barack Obama and what do you get? Nothing but embarrassment.
Let’s start with Al Gore and his polar bears.
Remember back in 2006, when “An Inconvenient Truth” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival? It wowed the Hollywood establishment, made money and won two Academy Awards.
Liberals found a new expression for their theology that capitalism is bad, and they prostrated themselves accordingly. Global warming became the perfect canvas with which to paint the evils of man — from automobiles to industrial progress to Wall Street.
Those brave polar bears, dying horrible deaths as they desperately swam from one bit of ice to another bit of ice, became the perfect symbols for the movement.
Only one problem. It wasn’t true. There are more polar bears today than there were 40 years ago, and the reason for it has nothing to do with global warming. Zac Unger, who has written a new book called “Never Look a Polar Bear in The Eye”, told NPR “There are about 25,000 polar bears alive today worldwide. In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded.”
Funny how that hunting fact never made it into Al Gore’s movie. Never let the truth get in the way of a good Hollywood documentary. But here liberals now sit, mourning the comeback of polar bear.
The revelation that polar bears do not make good climate indicators certainly does prick a hole in the fabric of the American liberal worldview. But when it comes to shocking revelations that lay bare the authenticity of the liberal agenda, polar bears have absolutely nothing on Anwar Al-Awlaki.
Awlaki was an American-born Muslim cleric who became an outspoken figure in Yemen for al-Qaida’s terrorist activities against Americans.
On Sept. 30, 2011, President Obama, without any oversight or due process, ordered Awlaki “droned” — that is, killed by a drone aircraft.
President Obama’s order also resulted in the death of Samir Khan, an American citizen born in Pakistan. A month later, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was droned in Yemen.
The man who before taking office raked George Bush and his administration over the coals for waterboarding detainees has become the president who kills fellow citizens without oversight.
Tell me again what a war criminal is?
To put a cherry on top of this hypocrisy, now comes a “cover your ass” document out of President Obama’s Justice Department that after the fact justifies the president’s killing of Awlaki. And it stakes out a doozy of a position for future assassinations. The government may drone anyone it pleases so long as the person is involved in plotting against the United States.
Must the person pose an “imminent” threat against the United States? “No,” according to the Obama Administration.
“The threat posed by al-Qaida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat,” the document says.
And there you have it. The liberal mind at work. This is the same thought process that led that famous American liberal FDR to unconstitutionally imprison Japanese-Americans. This is the same liberal thought that brought us the so-called “killing fields” in Cambodia, and this is the same kind of double-standard liberal thought that will facilitate this world’s next Auschwitz.
It’s the liberal thought that draws a distinction not on the act itself, but who is doing the act. If it’s a political opponent, then it’s bad. But if it is a political ally, then it’s justifiable.
As White House spokesman Jay Carney said, it’s OK for President Obama to kill American citizens without oversight because when Obama does it these strikes are “legal, they are ethical and they are wise.”
But you can bet the mortgage that the same thing would constitute a war crime if Dick Cheney were issuing the order.
It ain’t easy being a liberal these days.
Sherman Frederick is former editor of the Tribune-Herald and former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.