The whole idea of dragooning Congress into the oversight of preventive detention will go over like a lead balloon. Imagine you are a Congressman sitting on a panel that decides whether to release a detainee. Your options:

A) Vote to continue the imprisonment, in which case you get slammed by liberals, civil liberatarians, and anybody who has any respect for the Constitution and rule of law -- on account of your complicity in the sordid business of keeping people locked away without trial.

OR, you could

B) Vote to release the detainee, in which case you get slammed from the right for being weak on terrorism. And God forbid the released detainee is subsequently tied to an act of terrorism. It would spell the end of your career in politics

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Either way, you're setting yourself up for public abuse, and you're giving political opponents a club to whack you with. There is no way Congress wants any part of that. Self-interest aside, the general sordidness of it is enough to repel many politicians. Who would want to stain their legacy with this?

Again and again he painted opponents of the giant $800 billion porkfest as wanting to do "nothing" about the economic crisis, despite the fact that almost nobody was advocating that. Now he's pulling similar crap on his Terror strategies. If you oppose him you are an "extremist" who will make zero concessions to the exigencies of the War on Terror. Obama simply can't make an argument without reducing his intellectual opponents to cartoon caricatures of their real selves. His great genius is that he can be utterly contemptuous and condescending, and still leave a room with people thinking he was reasonable and respecting of all points of view. In my opinion, that makes him dangerous.

"My understanding was that this 'plan' was simply a continuation of the classic Bush "enemy combatant" detention scheme."

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No, he plans on cooking up some entirely some scheme in the legal equivalent of a witch's caldron.

Barack Obama has made a career out of pretending to have sincere respect for opposing viewpoints. In the end, he always does the politically expedient thing. I don't think he truly respects anything but the ability to inflict political pain. If he thinks you can hurt him, he will respect your opinion. Otherwise, you're wasting your breath even talking to him.

Charles Krauthammer, of all people, has perfectly summed up why a Barack Obama presidency is far more dangerous to civil liberties than a John McCain presidency would have been.

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"The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established."

--Krauthammer

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If McCain had adopted the same policies opposition would have continued unabated. Instead, the whole Bush agenda is now mainstream. The Left can't avoid its share of blame for this. Liberals worked hard to put an untested, unqualified, and unscrutinized politician into the highest office in the land. You succumbed to romance and rolled the dice on a smooth-talking man of mystery. Now you find you backed a wolf in sheep's clothing. We'll all be paying for this ill-advised gamble for a very long time.

"Has the opposition not continued unabated somehow? Here we are opposing it. I think the Obamotons blindly supporting the policies are not reflective of the opposition."

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Civil libertarians continue their opposition as before, but not too many others. Congress is in a mode of stuporous acquiescence. Just a year ago it was a hotbed of opposition. Obama's job-approval poll numbers continue to be high. Left-leaning blogs are largely falling in line with the Obama cant. Anti-war organizations are embarrassingly silent. We here who rant against what's happening are marginalized now.

Congress is in a mode of stuporous acquiescence. Just a year ago it was a hotbed of opposition.

You appear to be occupying a parallel universe to mine. I must admit I like yours better.

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Admittedly, Congress's outrage was largely insincere opportunism. Boisterous denouncements of the Bush security/secrecy agenda were good politics for Democrats, and good fundraising tools.

But. . . having said that, it still had value. All that firey rhetoric, however insincere, served to keep the Bush agenda firmly outside the mainstream in the public consciousness. Until recently NOBODY would have described Bush security policies as centrist. Barack Obama, with the tacit consent Congressional Democrats, has changed all that. At this point, I'd welcome some insincere rhetoric in opposition. It would be a lot better than sincere silence.

I hear you -- it still astounds and infuriates me how easily the myth of Obama the Distinguished Constitutional Scholar was perpetrated. The man's entire resume was paper-thin, including his credentials as Constitutional scholar. The unfortunate reality is that Barack Obama's candidacy was always a faith-based proposition. He was untested, unqualified, unscrutinized,and largely unknown. The American Left prides itself on being more rational than the Right, but there was never anything rational about the hype surrounding Barack Obama. Candidate Obama made grown men and women act like overwrought adolescents. Some find that an admirable quality in a leader. I don't