Andy McCarthy Loses It

By Steve Hynd

Wow. Andrew McCarthy at National Review is hearing black helicopters stuffed full of Islamic Communists coming to hide under his bed. And President Obama is the pilot!

The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left : He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment ... It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama's instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.

...Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely.  That's not weakness, it's strength � and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.

All this from a man who has previously argued that locking people up forever, without trial, without habeas rights but with torture, is as essential to preserving our freedoms as the right of (Republican) presidents to assert state secret privileges over anything they care to. Who's the real totalitarian hiding his true inclinations under a thin veneer of political pragmatism here?

Kevin Drum writes:

to his credit, [Rich] Lowry does respond to McCarthy here.  Remarkably (or not, perhaps), McCarthy then digs himself in even deeper here.  "I detect in your post a sense that I'm this close to the fringe," he says.  Well, there's no need to sense what I'm saying in my post, Andy.  You are batshit crazy.

Chris Orr at TNR has a post worth quoting in full for it's delicious snark in the service of Logic 101:

What I find most hilarious about the Andy McCarthy post Jason linked to is that, rather than try to situate Obama somewhere on the spectrum between fanatical ideologue and bloodless pragmatist, McCarthy simply asserts that the president resides at one extreme--except when he resides at the other. Though nonsensical, this description is, in its clumsy way, unfalsifiable: Any data point that conflicts with Obama's presumed "hard leftism" is evidence of his craven pragmatism, and vice versa.

I just wish that, as long as McCarthy was offering such a pointless analysis, he'd been a little more creative with his opposing categories. Something on the order of, "The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise..."

It's definitely time that Lowry, National Review's editor, asked McCarthy to take a leave of absence and maybe get some therapy - or failing that to go join WorldNetDaily instead.