Legal Commentary

Moving To The "Middle" On FISA

By Big Tent Democrat

Ed Kilgore writes:

And those who accuse [Obama] of cynicism for expressing heretical thoughts on FISA . . . now are perhaps the real cynics, who somehow thought he didn't really mean all his early talk about transpartisan politics or overcoming the stale debates of past decades.

The problem with this is that Obama is not being "heretical" on FISA, he is totally flip flopping on FISA. He said he would filibuster any FISA bill that included telecom immunity. Now he acts as if he never said that. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

The issue is not . . . [as] Obama-cheering Ed Kilgore put it -- that Obama is "stray[ing] from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship" by "expressing heretical thoughts on FISA" . . . [t]he issue is that Obama has repeatedly, over the course of the last year, made emphatic commitments and clear statements about his own core political values that are completely irreconcilable with his support for the FISA bill.

And Ed STILL does not understand that the fundamental reason John Kerry lost in 2004 was because the American People did not believe he would stand for something:

What is the cost of wishiwashiness? Ask John Kerry. From the Texeira/Halpin article:

The direct consequences of the identity gap were most evident in the 2004 presidential contest. According to 2004 post-election polling, the most commonly cited reason not to vote for Kerry among Bush voters who considered voting Democratic -- in other words, the voters who turned the election to Bush -- was Kerry's "flip-flopping" on the issues. . . . Similarly, the top reason cited by white Catholics for why Kerry lost the 2004 election was that the candidate was "not clear on what he stood for" (48 percent selected this reason as one of the two top reasons Kerry lost, twice as many as selected "permissive views on issues like abortion and gay marriage" as one of the reasons).

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 02, 2008 (boomark / email).