Clearly It's Some Sort Of Brilliant Trick

After eight years of the Village reading too much into Bush's complete incompetence and attributing it to being "shifty political maneuvers based on never wanting to ever be pinned down on anything substantive", the Village has taken a look at Obama's position on Gitmo and decided that it's a "shifty political maneuver based on never wanting to ever be pinned down on anything substantive." (h/t Digby)

Following up on my post below, I just heard Jim Miklasewski on NBC Nightly News say that Obama's orders today are designed to give himself wiggle room to distance himself from Bush's policies but not force him to live up to his campaign promises. Seriously. As I said earlier, I don't know that this is what Obama intended, but it's what the political media are interpreting his actions to mean.

I'm sure I don't need to go into the moral dimension of this issue, but I think the administration needs to set the press straight on this if he means to have a successful foreign policy. Trying to split the baby on these issues is impossible and it will undermine his moral authority in the rest of the world if they think he's being cute. (You can bet the intelligence community will leak any information that indicates he isn't sincere.)

If he means to make a clean break, he should make it clear to the media that it's what he means. They aren't seeing it that way.

Nor will they. You see, trying to pretend that everything Obama does is a brilliant Cheneyesque ploy to become Barack O-teflon is much more fun than reporting boring shit like "Obama has principles" or "Obama has a conscience" or "Obama has a human soul inside his human body and not kept in an obsidian phylactery" or anything that you know, might be the truth. Hope and change? They have to die. Hard. Obama must be defined as "just another politician" so that the Village can continue running the show.

Part of the "Obama is worse than Bush" meme of the next four years is to establish that Obama is no different from Bush on the substantitive issues, that everything he does is just politics and jockeying. Attributing all the stuff Democrats accused Bush of being and doing to Obama is a vital part of the plan. The "much worse" part is then much easier to segue into.

However, Digby is right: Obama has to lay down the law on the Village Idiots before they define Obama into something he most certainly isn't.