on DKos, defending Obama and blithely dimissing anyone who criticizes him on such issues like Glenn, using the exact same sorts of "defenses", talking points and memes:

--Obama's critics don't have access to the intelligence

--Obama's critics hate Obama and believe that he's the same as Bush in all ways

--Obama's critics are just egomaniacs trying to draw attention to themselves and their blogs

--Obama knows what he's doing, even if it might not make sense to the rest of us

--Obama's a good man, so I'm ok with this

--Obama has no choice, or else the intel community will destroy him

--Obama lives in the real world, his critics do not

And so on. Notice how they all spout the same talking points in defense of Obama on these issues, and how they're all ultimately about blindly trusting a man whom none of them know well if at all, because they just "know" that he's "good"?

I have to wonder how much of this is being coordinated offline, and and how much of it is by genuine (if misguided) Obama supporters, and how much by astroturfers, trying to sow division and acrimony on the left and push their issues. I suspect that there's more of the latter than we realize. This is right up Mark Penn's alley, and I wouldn't put it past entities in whose interest it is for Obama to hold these odious positions to stir up some fake grass roots support for them by alleged Obama supporters (and perhaps in the process make Obama believe that some on the left are ok with these positions). I obviously have no direct proof of this, but the similarity of these defenses, along with the pervasive use of astroturfing in politics, makes me suspect that this accounts for at least some, if not much, of what's going on here. Not that Obama doesn't have millions of genuine diehard supporters. But that just makes it easier for a PR outfit to exploit such support to ill effect, given that many of them are politically unsophisticated.

Something's going on here, not just with these positions, but with the politics behind them.

Whenever they get into this mode, I consider the comments thread to be official closed. At least to anything resembling intelligent and worthwhile discourse. I myself can't figure it out. Must be an inside baseball sort of thing that I'm just not clued into, or perhaps late night fatigue having its way. And as is well known here, I have no sense of humor, so it's all lost on me.

And I don't even have an iPod. I'm a Zune man, myself. It has FM. No static at all...

Night.

Although perhaps not for the same reasons as LondonLad has given, I actually agree that there's something undefinably "odd" about his presidency so far, and really about the man himself, that just doesn't compute for me. On the one hand he's spoken out so forcefully on the constitution and civil liberties, yet once in office he does all these things to shred both. And on the one hand he passed a decent stimulus bill and is supposedly trying to pass a very progressive budget, yet at the same time he's trying to bail out a defunct and corrupt financial system that's clearly insolvent. And I still find it somewhat hard to shake off this "Who IS this guy" feeling I have about him, due in large part to his emergence from near-obscurity to the presidency in just over 4 years. It's all been a bit too much to take in so fast.

I'm still prepared to write much of this off to Obama's being so relatively new at national politics, more politically weak or cowardly than we realize or would like to admit, and perhaps also too ready to drink of his own Kool Aid and not realize what's he's truly up against and trying to accomplish. But neither am I ready to say that this explains most of it. I am still very much in "Huh?!?" mode, as are many people on the left. Some things make a lot of sense from a progressive perspective, and some things make no sense at all. Ultimately, there's something uniquely new and strange about Obama that we've never seen in our lifetimes, that's throwing us all for a loop, in both pleasing and unpleasant ways. We can rationally articulate it in many ways, but there's also a certain "gut feeling" element to it that I can't deny.

We're still very much in limbo here. Well, those of us who don't deal in black and white, at least.

In a figurative, not skin color sort of way, of course.