When you line it up that way you'd almost think Pelosi and Obama were ad libbing a bit off identical scripts. Coulda done without that too, today. *sigh* But I never saw call to shoot the messenger. So thanks, . . . I think.

Do you think that if we went to any right wing blog, we would find so much bad mouthing of McSame as we have seen with Obama.

I'm not entirely clear on why you addressed that comment to me, RMP. But, to answer your leading question, Of Course Not.

I really appreciated this comment Mona made in response to someone on her blog:

#3 Comment by Mona —
June 17, 2008 @ 6:22 pm

There is this about the Democrats: they have a voter base willing to donate large sums of money to dump and pressure the bums.

No group of humans is comprised solely of angels, but so far I am impressed with the liberals/Democrats around the Intertubes who are willing to turn hard on Dems who — on the important issues — may as well be Republican authoritarians and/or neocons.

http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2008/06/17/8311#
comment-232680

the way trends are going and all, and he's getting ready. He seems to be taking it a lot more seriously than PissyPants did when his turn came up, and for that we can be grateful, I guess, but few of us here really wanted at Potentate in office, or any Throne at all for that matter. It wasn't supposed to be this way, but it is this way, and the question now is what, if anything, we all are prepared to do about it?

A benign monarch will hardly be objected to at all; a crazed Autocrat like we've had the last eight years, will raise more hackles. The fact that The Sedona Coot proves his inability and unsuitability every damb day makes his elevation to the Purple less and less likely.

So, Obama it is.

And it's gonna be tough on him from the get go, tougher than on any president since FDR. A monarch needs the kinds of tools he's being given -- if he expects to rule as well as reign.

This really is the transformation of the Republic into the Empire.

Chapter and verse.

What gives? Why did Obama stay silent for so long, and why did he finally offer such a muted response to the bill?

The answer is simple:

Barrack Obama plans to be the next President of the United States. Once he becomes President, he will be in the same position as George W. Bush: he wants all the power he needs to protect the country. Moreover, he will be the beneficiary of a Democratic-controlled Congress, and he wants to get some important legislation passed in his first two years in office.

Given these facts, why in the world would Obama oppose the current FISA compromise bill? If it's done on Bush's watch, he doesn't have to worry about wasting political capital on it in the next year. Perhaps it gives a bit too much power to the executive. But he plans to be the executive, and he can institute internal checks within the Executive Branch that can keep it from violating civil liberties as he understands them. And not to put too fine a point on it, once he becomes president, he will likely see civil liberties issues from a different perspective anyway.

It should now be clear why the Obama campaign has taken the position it has taken. And given what I have just said, Obama's supporters should be pressing him less on the immunity provisions and more on the first part of the bill which completely rewrites FISA. Because, if he becomes president, he'll be the one applying and enforcing its provisions.

See sig

I fundamentally don't get it. Obama sold out to take the UNPOPULAR position on FISA! If you're going to be a coward shouldn't you get something for it?

I'm sure one of the things he got was superdelegate support for the primary. The problem we on this side of the divide have is a structural information asymmetry that allows the insiders to make deals and present them in such a way that we don't know what went on, but in this case it's pretty easy to see the outline. When the primary was going hot and heavy and Obama was courting the supers, they held him to the fire over this issue, and he caved. There was probably some other stuff, like promising to "see what they could do" over healthcare and so on ("You want a good relationship with Congress once you get in, don't you big guy? Then you gotta play ball. You don't want to be like Jimmy Carter and alienate Congress with a goody two-shoes act, do you?"), but the core thing was almost certainly the superdelegates.

And yet another personal attack. I think that is about 20 for the day so far. What is laughable is the uproar in here about your liberal leaders coming to an agreement over this bill, not the bill itself. Our 4th amendment rights are nothing without the security from those that mean us harm. While I don't like the bill, I do understand the purpose behind it and I'm willing to accept it in return for security against another 9/11. You can agree or disagree with me and that is your right. I think people here tend to over-react a bit and jump off the cliff.

fair and balanced

-- bucks4mccain

Isn't that talking point patented?

A person who has no imagination or originality is doomed to fail. f**ks4mccain/bush fits squarely into that category.

The republicans have been proving for years that just because people don't agree with you on the issues doesn't mean they won't vote for you.

What IS a problem for a presidential candidate is if the members of your own party in Congress don't support you. Remember, Hillary was the beltway candidate, especially among the right leaning Dems, and if Obama now castigates nearly HALF of the Democratic congressmen, most of whom are not very enthusiastic about him trouncing their Chosen One in the primaries, that is not a good thing for his campaign. He'd rather lose the small numbers of people who actually won't vote for him based upon him weaseling out of opposing FISA than on losing the support of a large fraction of the Democratic Congress, ESPECIALLY those republican-lite ones from the battleground states.