Ross sharpens his point:

Fallows makes the point, correctly, that most liberals haven’t suddenly fallen in love with the anti-terrorism measures wiretapping and Guantanamo, drone attacks and assassinations that Barack Obama has either accepted or expanded. (“I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy,” he writes, “as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.”) But what they’ve done instead which many honorable exceptions, obviously is downgraded the importance of those issues, in much the same way that conservatives downgraded the importance of being against “big government” when a big-government Republican occupied the Oval Office. It wasn’t that most right-wingers explicitly changed their opinions on the wisdom of, say, expanding Medicare just because George W. Bush was championing a new prescription drug benefit: Conservative journals still editorialized against Medicare Part D, and conservative activists stored away the issue as an example of why Bush fell short of the Reaganite ideal. But if you followed the national political conversation from 2000 through roughly 2006, it was clear that most Republican partisans learned to live with spending and deficits that would have inspired, well, Tea Party-style activism if they had been the work of a Democratic administration. And the same thing has happened with many, many Democrats today: They aren’t happy, exactly, that Obama has expanded drone attacks (which are arguably more morally troubling than many “enhanced interrogation” procedures) along the AfPak frontier, but they seem to have downgraded these kind of policies from “grave threat to the very foundation of the republic” to “unfortunate failure that we have to learn to live with, because the Republicans are worse.”

On the last point, I don't believe drone attacks are morally more troubling than torture (if Ross reads his catechism, he'll come to the same conclusion) - and dismayed that Ross would use the Orwellian term, "enhanced interrogation" to justify what the church would describe as an absolute evil. The acquiescence of a movement premised in indivual liberty to the right of the executive to torture anyone he wants is of a different magnitude of betrayal and cynicism than anything we have seen on the left with respect to Obama and the war in Afghanistan (which, obviously, he promised in the campaign to wage aggressively).

Even so, this blog, for example, has clearly opposed the ramping up of the war in Af-Pak, and raised questions about the morality of drone attacks. And, frankly, the reaction of the left-wing blogosphere to Obama's centrism has been highly critical - light years more impressive than the supine silence of the intellectual right as Bush eviscerated every principle conservatives were supposed to uphold. Ah, yes, as Ross says, they "stored away" the criticism until later. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about the Washington right's utter lack of intellectual or moral integrity?