Legal Commentary

Why Dems Lose

By Big Tent Democrat

Because they listen to people like Nancy Soderberg (for a more thorough evisceration of Ms. Soderberg's nonsense, see Glenn Greenwald):

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumptive presidential candidate, said it was a close call but he had decided to endorse the bill. As he explained, the bill won't allow the president to "suggest that somehow there's some law that stands above the laws passed by Congress in engaging in warrantless wiretaps." The rest of the party should follow Obama's lead.

Besides being false, the current FISA law ALREADY "won't allow the President to 'suggest there's some law that stands above the laws passed by Congress in engaging warrantless wiretaps,'" it is political stupidity. It creates stories like this:

Is Barack Obama close to being shadowed by giant flip-flops and, worse, having the image stick with people all the way to the voting booth? Four years ago, Republicans branded as a "flip-flop" even the slightest rhetorical or policy change by John Kerry and sent huge replicas of the casual sandals to bob around the Massachusetts Democrat's events, feeding an image of him as a wishy-washy panderer.

Fair or not, Kerry never recovered and lost to President Bush. It's now the Republican weapon of choice against Obama. . . . [Obama] is giving the GOP effort ammunition and endangering his "Change We Can Believe In" motto with several shifts to the center . . .

. . . [Obama] now supports broader authority for the government's eavesdropping program and legal immunity for telecommunications companies that participated in it, supporting the bill after some protections were added.

Well, you made Nancy Soderberg happy Senator Obama. Was the flip flop worth it?

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 05, 2008 (boomark / email).