I haven’t blogged much about American politics in a while, but I find this interesting, so I figure it is worth sharing!
(if all you listen to is mainline Republican and Democrat talking points, some of these may surprise you)
- Despite antiwar speeches of 2008, he has to date has almost tripled the American troop presence in Afghanistan.
- He’s used five times as many drone strikes in Pakistan as George W. Bush.
- He used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute intelligence leakers twice as much as all the presidential administrations which preceded him combined.
- He’s deported about double the amount of illegal immigrants as George W. Bush.
- Despite promising that he would end the Bush administration policy of raiding medical marijuana distributors that violated federal statutes as long as the dispensaries appeared to be complying with state laws, Obama has carried out a crackdown on medical marijuana distributors that has exceeded that carried out by the Bush administration.
(Source)
Whatever you think about these individual issues, its clear that both his supporters and detractors talk about him as though they are totally blind to these things. To some degree, this distortion of image is fostered by the prevailing methodologies of political dialog. Basically, each of these five points are things that the Republicans are at least indirectly (and in some cases directly) saying Obama ISN’T doing enough of!