Peace Prize (cont'd)

Here's Glenn Greenwald from an excellent piece on Obama's peace prize:

 One of the most recurring features of the Bush-follower mindset was the claim that the President's supreme duty -- one which the Constitution requires him to swear to -- is to "protect the country," a rhetorical sleight-of-hand suggesting that the Constitution somehow venerates national security above other values.  As 23skiddo points out, Obama featured this exact claim in an even more misleading form yesterday when -- in explaining why King and Gandhi were too restrictive for him -- he described himself "as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation."
But as this Constitutional scholar surely knows, that is not what he swore to protect and defend when he took his oath of office.  Article II of the Constitution actually requires that he swear or affirm that he "will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.''  That's a critical difference, now almost always overlooked/ignored/distorted, as it was yesterday.

You should really read this whole piece. Greenwald discusses why people from both ends of the political spectrum have embraced the war justification words Obama spoke in Oslo. Basically it's this: the neo-cons and the right like it because it justifies everything their hero Bush did; the left likes it because it's rhetorically pleasing.