Damning as these true statements are, it’s a bit weird to see them offered, apparently as criticism, by a guy who runs a magazine that often as not takes an expansive view of executive power and doesn’t care much about due process when accused terrorists are involved. ~Conor Friedersdorf

Yes, it is a bit weird, which is how you know that Lowry isn’t offering these observations as criticism. He is engaged in a fairly uninteresting re-statement of things that have been obvious to a lot of us for years. It is damning that the Obama administration endorses unreviewable, unchecked presidential power to authorize the assassination of U.S. citizens on the suspicion of terrorism, but that isn’t why Lowry mentions it. He isn’t even pretending to be concerned with the executive branch’s overreach, the destruction of the rule of law, or the encroachment of the government on constitutional liberties. This isn’t one of those cases of conservative rediscovery of civil liberties during Democratic administrations–it is a celebration that the Obama administration has become as destructive of civil liberties as the Republican administration that preceded it. The entire column is an exercise in Cheney-like “we were right” gloating. To understand just how pitiful this is, consider the reasoning behind it: if Obama has continued or added to authoritarian and illegal Bush administration policies, those policies must therefore be “necessary” and appropriate. It couldn’t possibly be that different administrations from different parties could endorse the same immoral and illegal policies and that both could be equally wrong.

Naturally, it doesn’t bother Lowry and his allies in the least that Obama is doing these things, because they take all of this as vindication. Their party trashed the Constitution when it was in control of the White House, and now the other party is doing the same. According to the warped view Lowry is endorsing here, that isn’t a disgrace or a disaster for the U.S., but a gratifying victory for people who supported all of the Bush administration’s worst abuses. It doesn’t even matter that Lowry undermines the popular false narrative that Obama rejects American exceptionalism (so much for the “assault on American identity”!), because in the end the effort to portray Obama as hostile to American exceptionalism was simply a way of policing political discourse and pushing the definition of American exceptionalism in a more obnoxious nationalist direction.