I fail to see how saying (both on his own and through his proxy Emanuel) that he's against any prosecutions one day, and then saying that he's open to some prosecutions the next day, is an example of brilliant long-term political strategy. Care to explain that, or is his brilliance so mystically brilliant that mere mortals aren't capable of understanding it? Has a junior senator turned president who's been in elected politcs for all of 13 years and president for exactly 3 months, come up with a political strategy so advanced, the world has never seen it before?

Seriously, what's the strategy here? If you think he's that brilliant, you need to explain how, or at least give me your best guess. Simply saying or implying that he's so smart, it's impossible to keep up with his mind, is not a convincing argument. That's pretty much what Bushies said about Bush to make him out to be brilliant, and that we should stoop bashing him and just have faith in his judgement. I'm not saying that Obama himself is like Bush, but some of the arguments made to defend Obama's every move are earily like those made to defend Bush.

The only possible strategy that I can see here, if there actually is one, is that Obama is attempting to follow FDR's "This is what I want to do, now make me do it!" strategy. In which case, if that meant that he decided to so infuriate the left by saying that he wouldn't prosecute anyone, that the backlash would then "make him do it", then it clearly worked--and us unhinged angry lefties did exactly what he wanted us to do by raising hell over this! So if anything, we were in the right, and his defenders in the wrong. Or maybe his defenders' job was to make us even angrier. I'm not sure. This gets complicated awful fast, like a recursive algorithm...

Of course, I'm being facetious. But this is the only possible strategy that I can see here, and I doubt that it was what Obama had in mind. Most likely, he expected to get away with it, realized that he wouldn't, and wisely and decently changed his tune. In which case, even if it wasn't part of his strategy, our anger appears to have worked, while his defenders just acted peevishly.