Somebody once said that if you could just stay in the same place on the bank of a river long enough, eventually the answers would all float by you. (Though not, presumably, in sequence.) Well, for all those of us who have been sitting by the river waiting to find out why on earth Obama kissed Joe Lieberman's ass even after the SOB campaigned against him, the Lieberman Amendmend just floated by.
The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements. But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.
What BO has got himself here is a shameless Pub-Democrat who's perfectly willingnto take on the nasty job of fucking over the Democratic base with tricky, barely legal parliamentary maneuvers that keep Bushism alive and open for business despite our overwhelming repudiation of it while Obama can play the presidential game of "staying above the fray" and wave his clean hands around so we can see em. "It wasn't me, folks. I just work here."
And so on.
Does this maybe start to explain what we can expect Obama to get from Arlen Specter?
In the intelligence business (and elsewhere) this is called "a stalking horse", otherwise known as a fallguy. He leads everyone's attention away from where the action is and if eventually he runs into the neighbor's field and chews up all the corn, you can prove you were nowhere near the barn when he escaped. If necessary, you can shoot the damn horse. Meanwhile, your lawyer is in town proving to a judge without benefit of the neighbor's presence that said field belongs to you, after which you take the papers to a buyuer and sell it right out from under the neighbor who's still trying to wrestle your horse to the ground.
If this sounds like Chicago politics, where you think BO l'arned it?
The left will now no doubt follow the appropriate and predictable scenario and get all po'd at Lie-berman without bothering to ask themselves who put him up to it. Who allowed him to do it. Who encouraged him to do it. Who maybe even ordered him to do it.
I don't know but their initials are BO & RE.
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