Who to believe, Paul Krugman or anonymous posters on an online message board?

[Jim Lane]

44. I'm very unhappy that we still have troops in Afghanistan.

Are a lot of Republicans piling on Obama for not withdrawing our forces?

Is the presence of troops in Afghanistan something that the Commander in Chief has no responsibility for?

He also signed a bill that extended (i.e., made permanent) big chunks of the Bush tax cuts. He could have vetoed the bill and let taxes return to their prior, more appropriate levels. There was no GOP pileon about that (their attacks were of course from precisely the opposite direction), and it's hard to make the argument that Obama had no responsibility for Obama's signing of the bill.

To some extent, yes, we see a hypocritical GOP pileon, for example concerning some of the Bush administration's violations of civil liberties that Obama has continued. But if you're a Democrat who denounced those policies before 2009, then you're being equally hypocritical if you support them now just because it's Obama who's now responsible.