Bush: Goes to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, uses drone strikes
Reaction from liberals: Riots in the streets of major cities, calls for his impeachment, bush=war criminal, bush is an evil murdering maniac
Obama: Continues war in Afghanistan, escalates drone strikes, starts war in Libya, kills more civilians than bush did
You are being extremely disingenuous or ignorant.
Liberals are not the same as anarchists or leftists. The people who said Bush was a war criminal and vociferously opposed Bush administration on its War on Terror policies were not mainstream liberals. Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee are not the leadership of the Democratic Party. Dennis Kucincih types certainly attacked Bush and made some intemperate and dumb statements in my opinion. But, those same left-wing people have actually been very hard on President Obama on the same issues.
On the other hand, liberals have generally supported both administrations, except for when the Iraq War became an unmitigated disaster. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Harry Reid were not in the streets throwing Molotov cocktails. Also, there were no riots in the streets of major cities in opposition to Bush's foreign policy. There were a few milquetoast peaceful protests by hippies and assorted misfits and ragamuffins. Get your facts straight.
You're also ignoring the fact that Obama ended the War in Iraq and is winding down the War in Afghanistan. I agree too slowly on both counts, but John McCain was arguing we should stay in Iraq indefinitely back in 2008. So, Obama did a decent job considering that he's a mainstream US politician.
Also, Obama didn't really start the Civil War in Libya, did he now? On top of that, there was fairly limited US involvement. To compare the intervention in Libya to Iraq is laughable. We're talking about over 3,500 US troop fatalities versus 0 US troop fatalities.
And, by what measure has President Obama killed more civilians than President Bush? The Iraq War outpaces drone strikes by orders of magnitude in terms of civilian casualties.
You're also ignoring the real ways President Obama has reeled in the torture, saber rattling and scare tactics used by the Bush administration.
I think that first bolded statement pretty much sums up everything wrong with American liberalism. The fact that liberals went along with and in many ways made possible really terrible post-9/11 policies like the PATRIOT Act, like the Iraq War, etc. pretty much undermines the entire credibility of American liberalism when it seeks to distance itself from those same policies. American liberals marched in lockstep with Bush/Cheney in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, and while a bit of that is understandable given the political climate, the fact that this continued in spite of widespread evidence that Bush and his criminal administration was lying the nation into a completely pointless war in Iraq is pretty disgusting.
Obama actually campaigned on expanding and then actually did expand the War in Afghanistan. Winding down the war as he has has largely been the result of pushback in Congress, not Obama's own initiative in that regard. And the John McCain line was clearly one taken out of context, as he was referring to America's seemingly indefinite occupations of South Korea, Japan, Germany, etc. That's partisan nonsense to claim it was otherwise. Lest we also forget that Obama only left Iraq because the Iraqis literally kicked the United States out.
What exactly was the point of American intervention in Libya, though? Obviously in retrospect it worked out, but that wasn't clear going into the conflict. Aside from that, the money spent on dropping bombs on Libya would probably have been better spent on rebuilding American infrastructure, employing people, etc.
Obama has done next to nothing to 'reel in torture'. His promise to close down Guantanamo Bay was broken literally a week into his administration. If anything he has upped the ante in the saber-rattling with Iran and North Korea so as not to appear 'weak' to his Republican opponents.
