Obama Authorizes Covert Support for Libya Rebels: Progressives All Messed Up

The Libya campaign is really sorting out a lot of partisan recrimination dating back to the early Bush administration. CNS reports on Barack Obama's 2002 campaign ad that claimed:

"I don't oppose all wars. ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."

Now the president's saying that it's our responsibility as world leader to "protect fellow human beings" facing extermination at the hands of their own governments.

Oops.

And to top it off, lefties are a little discombobulated that Obambi's authorized covert action in Libya. Seriously. Emptywheel wants "The One" placed before a war crimes tribunal, and Excitable Andrew Sullivan just can't accept the truth:

I simply cannot believe it. I know the president is not against all wars - just dumb ones. But could any war be dumber than this - in a place with no potential for civil society, wrecked by totalitarianism, riven by tribalism, in defense of rebels we do not know and who are clearly insufficient to the task?

Contrast that to Ann Coulter, who's hardly dumbstruck at the president's perfidy, "Obama Cried, Kids Died":

... Democrats couldn't care less about the interests of their own country. Indeed, if there were the slightest possibility that our intervention in Libya would somehow benefit the United States, they would hysterically oppose it.

When it came to the Iraq War -- which actually served America's security interests -- Democrats demanded proof that Saddam Hussein was 10 minutes away from launching a first strike against the U.S. They denounced the Iraq War nonstop, wailing that Saddam hadn't hit us on 9/11 and that he posed no "imminent threat" to America.

What imminent threat does Libya pose to the U.S.? How will our interests be served by putting the rebels in charge?

Obama didn't even suggest the possibility that our Libyan intervention serves the nation's interest. Last weekend, his defense secretary, Robert Gates, said the uprising in Libya "was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest." So, not a vital interest, but an interest. Like scrapbooking, surfing or Justin Bieber.