Liberals have found another reason to be angry with President Obama: the ouster of P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman who announced his resignation Sunday after criticizing the Pentagon for its treatment of the WikiLeaks case suspect Private Bradley Manning.
Jane Hamsher, one of Obama’s consistent antagonists at the liberal blog FireDogLake, which probably most epitomizes former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs’s epithet “the professional left,” is leading the charge. She wrote Monday in support of a protest against Manning’s treatment and Crowley’s firing with a march from the State Department to the White House. “With his firing of Crowley, Obama makes a mockery of his own claim to be a constitutional scholar who supports transparency in government,” Hamsher wrote.
“Other than Obama's tolerance for the same detainee abuse against which he campaigned and his ongoing subservience to the military that he supposedly ‘commands,’ ” wrote Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. “It is the way in which this Manning/Crowley behavior bolsters the regime of secrecy and the President's obsessive attempts to destroy whistle blowing that makes this episode so important and so telling.”
Crowley’s firing has reinforced liberal distaste of an iteration of Obama’s “no-drama” philosophy, which some believe has resulted in the entrenchment of secrecy in the federal government. And they have long complained about his retreat from the strongest ideological positions he took in the 2008 campaign, particularly against Bush-era torture and the closing of Guantanamo Bay. “I think this is wrong,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates on his blog at the Atlantic. “And it's very hard for me to believe that, circa 2006, Senator Obama wouldn't say as much.”
On Sunday, Andrew Sullivan declared that Obama “owns the treatment of Manning now.” “By firing PJ Crowley for the offense of protesting against the sadistic military treatment of Bradley Manning, the president has now put his personal weight behind prisoner abuse,” Sullivan wrote. “The man who once said that forced nudity was a form of torture, now takes the word of those enforcing it over a distinguished public servant.” Attendees at the MIT seminar on Thursday where Crowley called the military's treatment of Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid" have written a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing "severe disappointment" about the spokesman’s abrupt resignation.