June 22, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: ‘We Came, We Saw, He Died:’ Dems’ Breathtaking Hypocrisy On War Powers.

After last night’s strikes on Iran, Democrat politicians reached screeching levels of hypocrisy over Donald Trump’s decision to act rather than wait for an Iranian nuclear weapon deployment. Chuck Schumer demanded action from Congress, as did Hakeem Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led calls for impeachment. Practically every Democrat on Capitol Hill — with the notable exception of John Fetterman — rushed to promote their “authoritarian” narrative about Trump.

All of this venting reveals very short memories on the port side of Capitol Hill. Fourteen years ago, they couldn’t get enough of presidential strikes on a nation in the very same region. Remember Hillary Clinton’s chortling over the fall of Moammar Qaddafi and the role she and Barack Obama played in it? “We came, we saw, he died,” she raved to Leslie Stahl after a joint US-EU bombing campaign decapitated Qaddafi’s regime, and left a failed state in its wake:

In March 2011, Obama ordered a series of military strikes on regime targets in Libya, not because of a clear and present danger to US security or assets, but because of a “responsibility to protect” doctrine promoted by Samantha Power. The Qaddafi regime was brutally suppressing dissent at the time, as Qaddafi had done for decades, but Qaddafi had also cooperated with the West on nuclear non-proliferation. Nevertheless, Obama and the Left wanted Qaddafi gone, and without going to Congress conducted military attacks with the express purpose of collapsing his regime in favor of the rebels in and around Benghazi — a bitter irony, in the end.

Obama never even bothered to formally report the action to Congress, as required under the War Powers Act, with the lame excuse that he ordered the strikes to support the action led by NATO. At the time, Harold Koh argued that the War Powers Act didn’t apply because of the limited nature of the conflict — which had been going on for three months at that point — and the administration’s interpretation of the word “hostilities” in the act. As long as US ground troops weren’t involved, Koh argued, the president had full authority and no responsibility to notify Congress at all, Koh argued.

Nancy Pelosi is in full “past performance is no guarantee of future results” mode:

The Squad is similarly Big Mad at – checks notes – Trump preventing Ayatollah Khamenei from acquiring a nuclear weapon:


As for the rest of us:

Flashback: The New York Times, January 24th, 1981:

Bruce W. German, one of the freed hostages, said today that some of his colleagues were having more problems than others in adjusting. ”They showed us videotapes of the embassy takeover,” he said, ”and some of the group simply would not look at them.”

Mr. German, from Rockville, Md., was the budget officer at the United States Embassy in Teheran. He described what it was like to be in the embassy on Sunday, Nov. 4, 1979, when the Iranian militants broke in.

”I was working in the basement of one of the buildings in the compound,” he said. ”Sunday is just another working day in the Islamic world. We could hear the crowd yelling and cheering. Then someone came in and told us we’d better move upstairs to a safer location. We barricaded ourselves in but it didn’t make any difference. We had to let them in or they would have torn the whole place down. That first day was the closest I’ve ever come to total terror.”

Asked if he considered resisting or escaping, Mr. German replied, ”When there is a gun being cocked in your ear, you don’t have many options.”

Would Return ‘in a B-52’

Mr. German, 44 years old, said he believed that the hostage crisis could make life difficult for other diplomats. ”There is just no way you can make an embassy safe from half a million angry people,” he said. Mr. German added that he would never take a foreign post where new security measures, now being planned, were not in effect. As for Iran, he said he would return there – ”only in a B-52.”

Today of course, the current iteration of the New York Times is in full “better dead than rude” mode:

UPDATE:

MORE: “Suddenly we know what a woman is?” Caleb Hull tweets. 

Posted at 10:14 pm by Ed Driscoll