The Left is okay with executive overreach, when it’s their guy doing it

According to Power Line, when a Fox News Poll asked people point blank whether our system supports a president circumventing Congress, 74% of respondents said “no” and only 23% said “yes.”  That answer was only marginally different when the question was re-framed to ask people to ignore the way things should be under our Constitution and, instead, to answer whether they thought it was okay for Barack Obama to circumvent Congress.  In that case, 60% of respondents thought that it still wasn’t okay and only 37% of them approved of Obama acting as a dictator.

My very first thought when I read about that 37% was that I think I know every one of them on my real-me Facebook.  In that Facebook account, with the exception of conservative friends I’ve made in the last few years, and a handful of apolitical people, everyone else in my world — the world made up of school friends, work friends, and neighborhood people — is rabidly Progressive.

These Progressives have been silent since October, when it became clear that Obamacare was going to be an even more dismal, dysfunctional failure than Republicans predicted.  Now, however, with Obama promising to enact his agenda unilaterally, they’re happy again.  When they’re not celebrating gay rights (and I’d so that, gay or straight, 75% of their political Facebook posts are about gay rights), they’re starting to put up MoveOn.org style posters encouraging what most Americans recognize as Obama’s lawlessness.

If one were to ask my highly educated, well compensated friends to support their position, I’m sure that all would reply that (a) whatever is wrong now is the fault of Republicans in Congress and (b) that the ends justify the means.  That phrase, incidentally, is one of the scariest in the English language.

Nor would any of them be fazed if they were shown Obama’s blatant hypocrisy:

These Progressives would only say, again, that it’s not hypocrisy at all.  The problem wasn’t executive overreach, they’d say, it was Bush’s executive overreach.  When Obama does the same thing, it’s different.