Bye-bye ‘hope and change?’

L'Hote’s Freddie DeBoer is walking away from “Hope and Change.”

The liberal Glenn Greenwald acolyte writes that the president has shockingly asserted “a universal and unchecked right” to assassinate American citizens “with absolutely no due process or review of law at all.” Given the magnitude of this affront to civil liberty in his view, DeBoer pledges not to support Obama’s candidacy in 2012.

DeBoer is referring to a rare “kill order” the White House authorized against Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born Muslim cleric. American intelligence pegged him as a particularly dangerous Al Qaeda operative. The sanction is not an all-purpose, 007-like “license to kill” (as far as we know). But in fairness to DeBoer, I’ll stipulate that the distinction is moot. Nonetheless, targeted killings in wartime are legal albeit distasteful. The implication that Obama (or any president) would sanction killings outside the narrow scope of war or on whim is ludicrous on its face. I’ll leave the larger moral arguments to the poets.

DeBoer seems a decent chap, a philosopher at heart, I think. And I respect his principled stance vis-à-vis Obama. Part of me admires him for it. Another part of me finds it mystifying. Like many on the far left, DeBoer presumably bought into the fantasy of Obama as the Last Great Hope of liberal aspirations. He has been understandably disappointed by the president’s dogged pragmatism and compromise in governance (likely the root of his ire). Yet, Obama faces no viable Democratic opposition. His re-election is almost a given. What, then, is the point of abstaining? Though there is value in Frederick Douglass’ clarion to “agitate, agitate, agitate,” is that all the angst amounts to?

I am reminded of a scene the 2005 film War of the Worlds (I think that’s the right one). In it, a giant Tripod is wrecking havoc, destroying everything in its path. A bible-wielding priest suddenly stepped in front of the Tripod and begged it to stop in the name of God, morality and reason. The Tripod paused as if listening, readjusted a laser weapon – and then vaporized the well-meaning man of the cloth.

Which is all to say that, in the end, I hope the epitaph of idealists like DeBoer won’t read: Gallantly, admirably, they stood unyielding on principle – but, alas, changed nothing.