Is Obama unbound?

Here's another essay by Victor Davis Hanson. this time he writes about the "weird paradoxes of American presidential politics."

Richard Nixon went to Red China with political impunity. Had a Democrat tried that, he would have been branded a commie appeaser.

To this day, liberals cannot conceive that during the two world wars, progressives like Woodrow Wilson, Earl Warren and Franklin Delano Roosevelt trampled on civil liberties in a way unimagined by Dick Cheney.

Ronald Reagan signed the most liberal illegal immigration amnesty bill in history, and ran larger yearly deficits than had Jimmy Carter. “Read my lips” George H.W. Bush agreed to huge tax increases. And George W. Bush ran up the largest debt of any eight-year president, outspending Bill Clinton by more than fivefold. The latter, remember, bombed Belgrade without either congressional or United Nations approval — and without antiwar protests.

Without an opposition, almost anything goes. The result is that for the next year or so, Obama can more or less do whatever he wishes abroad. If he chooses to bomb a country that poses no direct threat to the U.S. without congressional authority, like Libya, or to assassinate a U.S. citizen-terrorist, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the Left will keep mum. And the Right, for different reasons, probably will, too.

The link: http://rightwingnews.com/column-2/obama-unbound/