Taibbi: No More Compromise -- Obama Must Wholly Reject Bush's Dictator Policies

[laststeamtrain]

Taibbi: No More Compromise -- Obama Must Wholly Reject Bush's Dictator Policies
By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant
Posted on June 1, 2009, Printed on June 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140368/

The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it’s, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.

Why is the Gitmo decision classic Democratic Party thinking? Because when certain of us said we wanted Gitmo closed, we sort of meant a change in policy -- we didn’t mean just physically closing the plant, moving the prisoners elsewhere, and leaving the policies essentially unchanged. This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There’s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They’re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they’ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along -- and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

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I still like Obama, in a lot of ways. Having a president with less ability to inspire public confidence at a time like this, with our economy in such a death spiral, would be a disaster; God knows where we’d be right now with a McCain or a Mike Huckabee at the helm. But this guy has to show some stones somewhere along the line. He has to just forget the DC game and just take a clear stand on an issue like this sometime. He’s kind of running out of time to rescue his all-important first impression.

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/140368/taibbi%3A_no_more_compromise_--_obama_must_wholly_reject_bush%27s_dictator_policies/