Conor Friedersdorf recently posted the following question in The Atlantic:

How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

1. Codify indefinite detention into law;
2. draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process;
3. proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens;
4. prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets;
5. reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible;
6. enter and prosecute such a war;
7. institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports;
8. oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots;
9. wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy;
10. invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits;
11. preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries;
12. attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed);
13. reauthorize the Patriot Act;
14. and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

For me, the answer is obvious. I would have strenuously opposed a Republican candidate who ran on such a platform. I would have identified these as serious threats to civil liberties, and I would have argued that the candidate should not be elected on this basis. And if a sitting Republican president actually did these things? I'd say that they needed to be tossed out of office.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.

Yep. That's a problem. As Friedersdorf suggests at the end of his article, it is such a serious problem that it makes it tough to argue that anyone should support Obama's re-election because he's the lesser of two evils.

Of course, one could claim that Romney would do everything on this list and that he'd also hurt the economy, start a war with Iran, promote a Mormon theocracy, etc. This would allow one to argue that Obama is still the lesser of two evils. I'm just not sure I could stomach voting for someone with Obama's record on civil liberties. In this particular case, the lesser of two evils is still pretty damn evil.

H/T to Bay of Fundie

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