tom junod – Moe Lane

I don’t normally do follow-ups to posts so quickly, but there seems to have been some reaction (generally favorable, which is gratifying) to my written fist-to-the-nose to Tom Junod. The triggering for my response is from Jonathan Last, who (accurately) called what I did to Junod both ‘flat-out brutal’ and ‘pretty fair.’ Jonathan then asks a question: why haven’t more of our supposedly principled liberal altruists taken the next step from disapproving of what Barack Obama does, to breaking with him permanently?

As Lane points out, if you’re a liberal and you fell a-over-t for Obama and now you realize that he’s elevated cold-blooded murder to the level of routine executive prerogative, why haven’t you clapped your hands together, stepped away from the table, and said, “I’m out”?

Continue reading #rsrh Answering @JVLast’s question about why there’s been no liberal repudiation of Obama.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.]

You know what’s missing from this Tom Junod piece on drone strikes?(Via Instapundit)

Oh, sorry, quick background: a US drone strike recently killed a sixteen year old American called Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was the son of notorious traitor Anwar al-Alwaki. There’s no immediate reason to explain why the younger al-Awlaki was killed; it could be anything from an accident to a recognition of the old rule of thumb that ‘nits make lice.’ Anyway, Mr. Junod here is very, very upset that this death happened. He is very, very sternly lecturing the Obama administration about not revealing its reasoning for the death, assuming that the Obama administration even has one. Mr. Junod is very, very much the model of principled opposition to this “Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” as he so pithily put it. But, again: do you know what’s missing from this piece of Junod’s?

Any repudiation of this piece Junod wrote in response to Election Night 2008:

I wasn’t looking for hope, that’s for sure; I was looking for evidence that Obama couldn’t win in the face of an evil as potent as the Republican party. As my mother got weaker and the light began to be blanched from her eyes, I would go to the blogs right after my daughter went to school, and then just before I went to visit my mom, and then as soon as I came home, and then for a few minutes while my daughter took her bath, and then, after I kissed my wife and she went to bed, in the dark hour past midnight. I hated Joe the Plumber more than I hated anyone on earth. He was my comfort, because he was death itself, and he allowed me to hate not just him but it.

I’d told myself on the plane that I wasn’t going to look at any of the dozens of inescapable televisions that line the terminal in Atlanta. I’d told myself that I was going to wait till we got home and Nia got to bed before I started to check any of the returns. My vow lasted until I saw the hovering face of Campbell Brown reporting on Kentucky. Campbell, she of the gorgeous hair, was calling Kentucky for John McCain — and suddenly I felt something I hadn’t felt since my mother died. I felt nauseous. I was doubled over, not by the news of McCain’s win but by the prospect that Obama might lose.

Continue reading Tom Junod’s cowardly attack on Barack Obama’s cowardly drone strikes.