Sean Bugg, the editor of Metro Weekly:
Where I disagree with the president is the inept, foot-dragging, mollycoddling process he put into place that seemed designed to placate bigots rather than repeal a discriminatory law. There were no shortage of people who warned that putting DADT repeal on a track that wouldn’t end until after the certain-to-be-difficult midterm elections could be disastrous.
Plenty will argue that the 2009 calendar was too busy to deal with DADT, but if the plan was always to create a months-long timeline for the Pentagon to ask straight soldiers and their spouses, ”How do you feel?” then the previous year would actually have been the time to do so.
Instead, we now face a situation where an overly cautious political pragmatism has turned into a case of political malpractice.
Since January’s State of the Union address, when he included DADT repeal in his list of legislative priorities, all he has asked for is patience in a process that his administration crafted. At The Atlantic website, political reporter Marc Ambinder wrote of the president’s reaction to the continued DADT protests: ”I do know that President Obama gets angry every time he’s heckled by ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ protesters. He thinks he’s doing everything he can given the constraints imposed on him by reality.”
Frankly, tough shit. His administration crafted the approach that brought us to this impasse and most of the hits the White House is taking for it are deserved.
