Unconditional Surrender

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Let's just swear in President Bachmann right now.

Right after we wave bye-bye to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health care for anyone not a millionaire, public schools, minimum wage, clean water, safe food, police and fire protection .... and any last semblance of civilization here in New Gilead.

Genuflect to our new corporate overlords. Their minions, the republicans, have won.

No, I'm not exaggerating. Even never-say-die Obama apologist Steve Benen calls him a coward:

Holder told reporters this afternoon that his original decision was still the right one, but blamed Congress for "tying our hands."

He happens to be right. Even today, Holder wants to do the right thing, and so does President Obama. And yet, Gitmo is open today, and KSM will be subjected to a military commission in the near future, not because of an administration that backed down in the face of far-right whining, but because congressional Republicans orchestrated a massive, choreographed freak-out, and scared the bejesus out of congressional Democrats. Together, they limited the White House's options to, in effect, not having any choice at all.

There's plenty of room for criticism of the administration, but those slamming Obama for "breaking his word" on this are blaming the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

No, I'm not blaming him for breaking his word. I'm blaming him for being a coward - for letting the most pathetic bunch of retarded, narcissistic bullies in the history of the world push him around.

Steve M. says they're worse than cowards:

Not cowardice exactly -- more like false bravado. A big percentage of the country wants to flatter itself by imagining that these guys have superpowers, and the military or the Bush administration or Cheeto-chomping right-wing bloggers are somehow holding these supervillains at bay using superhuman powers of their own. These folks aren't pants-wetters, they're worse: they're people who want to persuade you they're tough by exaggerating the risks they, and they alone, are fending off. (They certainly give no credit to the actual current commander in chief, or anyone in his administration.)

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And I'd just like to remind you of what Peggy Noonan wrote less than a month ago:

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations....

America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom.

Noonan's a right-wing apparatchik, but she's old-school, so she doesn't always remember what ideas have been disappeared by the right's culture commissars. She still thinks it's the early Bush era, when it was unthinkable that we wouldn't force bin Laden to do a perp walk into a courtroom in Manhattan, assuming we caught him alive. And, as Noonan's slip-up reminds us, that would have been perfectly fine.

Yes, these are the shitting-themselves morons to whom Barack Obama has unconditionally surrendered.