The Blogger Independence Fallacy

Will left-of-center bloggers go easy on Barack Obama after he is sworn in as the next president?

If human nature and all of the right-of-center bloggers who have been struck deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to writing about the extralegal excesses of George Bush's tenure are any indication, the answer is a resounding "yes."

Exhibit A in this regard is Bush's embrace of Nazi-like terror techniques, to my mind and many others the most atrocious aspect of a presidency that has determinedly turned the separation of powers, due process and the Rule of Law on its collective ear.

This in service of the specious claim that The Decider is above the law and should have unlimited powers in the post-9/11 world even if it means defecating on the very constitutionally enshrined rights that the so-called Global War on Terror is supposed to protect.

ABC News's recent stories on the lengths to which Bush's inner circle went to in vetting and approving those terror techniques during dozens of White House meetings was greeted with resounding silence by all but a very few of the 15 or so right-of-center blogs that I read regulary.

As were subsequent stories that the president bragged about the meetings and that torture is okey-dokey with the increasingly befuddled man who wants to succeed him so long as the victims aren't Americans. (Memo to John McMaverick: José Padilla is an America.)

Anyhow, a conspicuous exception to the right-of-center silence was Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse, who was painfully candid about why so many of his brother and sister bloggers don't have the guts to address this outrage head on:

"There are some issues that you just don’t write about if you're a conservative blogger looking to maintain or build your site. And one of those issues is torture and this administration’s blatant violation of the law in approving interrogation techniques that are universally recognized (outside of the right in America) as illegal."

Ed Morrissey, a refreshingly independent thinking blogger when he was at the helm of the late lamented Captain's Quarters, has been so thoroughly inculcated into the conformity of the right-of-center crew at Hot Air that his take on the ABC News stories was a grouchy "what did you expect?," while he piously noted that Bush's posse was careful to make sure it had a legal fig leaf to justify physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation and that old stanby, waterboarding.

In one of the most insipid justifications that I've read in a long time, Morrissey wrote that:

"If anything, this story should emphasize the fact that the administration tried to find and outline the most aggressive boundaries for interrogations without crossing into actual torture."

As has been copiously documented, there were no boundaries and that legal fig leaf is a grotesquery.

Not too be too rough on The Captain and too easy on Moran, who does have a knack of being able to bash liberals and lefties no matter how egregious the Bush administration's excesses.

My larger point is that while an Obama administration can be expected to show more interest in building up America than tearing it down, most left-of-center bloggers will dutifully cop the same hands-off attitude that their cohorts on the other side have embraced over the last seven long years.

You can bank on it. That is unless your local financial institution has gone belly up.