Whatever, and whoever is elected, the loyal GOPS, and those sold-out-associates in scams of Fellow-in-War-Crime, a Sign may likely hang by a rotten rubber band in the Closed-Bankrupt-Store, a hand written note that proclaims:

`

CLOSED---IT'S All somebody else's fault.

CLOSED---You did not buy the war tales.

That's true folks. GOPS request cold cash.

They'd know NO peace if it sat on a laptop.

a hopping bunny tale is fluffy. 'Um creepy.

He appears to me to be almost ready to pardon the Bush Administration telling us we must move on in a new direction while he embraces most of Bush's policies.

I have no faith now that wee will get a lobbyist free national healthcare plan, or that NAFTA will change, that war will continue etc. Obama acts like one who is being bought already, refusing to stand with the principles he espoused so artfully during the primaries. He is doing just the opposite and I am quickly losing hope that there will be any significant change in America at all.

Better than McCain is quickly turning into "at least more tolerable" than McCain.

What is your blog about?

Whatever topics I think are worth writing about. Democratic weakness and complicity in general has long been a topic I've written about -- it's a major theme of the book I just wrote, and it's been a topic of countless posts I've written over the years. It's not new.

What's new -- and apparently the reason you're noticing -- is that Obama, rather than other Democrats, is one of the targets of the criticism.

Glenn, you have done great work on FISA. So why is it "not worth" restating your case?

For exactly the reason that you said - I've made the case about FISA many times in the last two weeks and there was nothing in Olbemann's commentary that warranted a long exposition.

It seems you have entirely moved on (no pun intended) to making clear every single thing Obama has done wrong in your view since getting the nomination.

That's absurd hyperbole. Obama supported the Supreme Court's habeas corpus decision. I've written much about John McCain (including a post that led to a front page article in the NYT on his shift on Executive Power issues). Before that, I wrote several posts attacking the attempt to depict Obama as "anti-Israel."

He's shifted his posture the last two weeks and I'm hardly the only one to notice - or object.

You say that "blogs" sprang up as a reaction to the weak opposition of the past eight years, and that "blogs" have always taken weak Democrats to task. You need to be reminded that you don't speak for "blogs." "Blogs" are a rather broader category than you seem to understand. There are, in fact, conservative blogs. There are moderate blogs. The evildoers at The New Republic even have a blog. Several in fact. Some of us even read them without being brainwashed.

It's true that in the last couple of years, establishment media outlets have created what are, technically speaking, "blogs," but I'm referring to the group of online activists and outside-the-Beltway commentators that pioneered political blogging and offer a different perspective.

FISA is absolutely another story considering the promises Obama made. He shouldn't have made them, even though they were only with respect to telecom immunity. He should have been counted on to support a compromise; the problem is that it wasn't a compromise but a cave in led by Pelosi and Hoyer. Obama was trapped, but he wasn't going to show Nancy Pelosi up and make her into some kind of fascist authoritarian. So he supported the compromise/capitulation in the name of compromise on principle, and in support of his party leadership. It was certainly shameful but not only on Obama's part. And he hasn't voted for it yet.

How do you know Obama was "trapped" by what they did? How do you know he didn't approve of it ahead of time, or even that it was his campaign who went and demanded that a compromise be reached to take the issue off the table?

The willingness of so many people to invent fantasies like this about what happened to put Obama in the best possible light is exactly the reason I've been writing about this so much.

It's wise to hatetohaggle with a Red Snapper. The turtle tail drags across the scroll and makes it muddy.

Possums need to go outside and sweat. Pick up a pick and a rusty hoe. Pour French perfume on a fool.

Use good garden tools.

No growl like a black bear.

UT makes one want a beer.

I think Olberman's reaction showed that he heard what was being said on this blog. What I found ridiculous was Olberman's use of John Dean in just the way Glenn noted. It was as if Dean was the Wizard of Oz. Dean is a smart guy, no doubt about it, but that move was really over the top.

Most importantly, Olberman contradicted himself in a rather glaring way. On the one hand, he keeps insisting that Obama has to play "politics," you know, the kind of "politics" that the D.C. press corps and political class insist is the only "politics" that counts as "politics." Then, he goes and says that Obama can redeem himself by announcing that his administration will aid in criminal prosecutions of members of the Bush administration. Now seriously. Does anyone really believe Obama would or could say that in a campaign? And does anyone believe that Olberman will follow up on this, if Obama doesn't make that announcement?

Would it not have made more basic political sense for Obama to come out not supporting the bill? When I listen to Obama these days I feel like I'm watching Bill Clinton. And while Clinton was a skilled politician, he also betrayed those who put him in the White House.

I think Obama doesn't have the spine for the kind of conflict involved in really cleaning up the mess that the Bush administration created. And I think the American public is out ahead of him and his party handlers. I think there's something rotten in the political class of this country. There are too few Russ Feingolds and too many Harry Reids in an opposition party that could have acted like that with the public's support after Nov. 2006. Watch Rahm Emmanuel sometime saying, "we didn't have the votes," and you realize that it isn't really a question of not having the votes but a lack of political will on the part of Democrats to do something about the lawlessness of this president. I don't think it's "battered woman's syndrome" (maybe it is for some in the mid-West but not for Nancy Pelosi who represents San Francisco, probably the most liberal area of the country). I think it's that the Democrats have moved closer to their Republican counterparts, because they believe in the U.S. war on terror, which is a silly war, a political campaign more than anything else. The 9/11 attacks were a product of government negligence and not paying attention more than anything else, but to acknowledge that means that you have to do something other than create an enormous ideological machinery like during the Cold War. And the government appears not to be able to really live without something like the Cold War to keep the military industrial complex going, etc. And finally to keep the myth alive that America is exceptional--I think that's the real taboo here. The idea that the U.S. is not exceptional, that if you engage in policies that treat the peoples of the Middle East like they just happen to be sitting on "your" oil and you keep Israel as the never ending bully on the block that can do whatever it wishes to the neighborhood to keep escalating its ridiculous levels of regional dominance, and you keep bases in Saudi Arabia after they're needed, and you support the dictators of the region and call those countries "moderate," if you do all of that, there will be some response. Period.

So I think American exceptionalism (which country doesn't think of itself as exceptional?) is one piece of the puzzle that keeps the Democratic leadership too enthralled to the war on terror, too possessed by it rather than taking it over, and too weakened by it to reinstall the rule of law.