I've added links to Greenwald's
statement to counter his claim:
Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy:
in many crucial areas, he has done more to
subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a
GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support,
or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to
loathe.
Note: the above links were added to prove a point.
The notion that President Obama is weakening the "left's political agenda" is bullshit.
As for Greenwald's other examples.
"He has
gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war."
What Greenwald and others who make the "war on whistleblowers" claim always fail to mention is that Obama is cleaning up Bush's mess here.
NYT:
<...>
Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration’s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake’s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency’s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a “culture of leaking.”
Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.’s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants.
<...>
Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson.
The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007.
<...>
Bush launched the investigations and now Obama is cleaning up the mess. Drake home was raided and he was terminated during the Bush administration.
So what's the spin: Absolve Bush for launching the investigations, add a qualifier for Bush's convictions and repeat often "Obama's prosecutions!!"
It's bullshit!
Had Bush not launched these investigation, Obama wouldn't have to go through the process of cleaning up these loose ends.
As for Libya, Greenwald stretches the truth ("in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war"). Not only did the Senate vote in support of a no-fly zone (Bernie Sanders was a co-sponsor, the votes Congress took were inconclusive,
both votes failed.
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