Kos (Gasp!) With Something Resembling Common Sense

In the fallout from the FISA debacle. More than our Senate simply proving, once again, that it is not run by real Democrats. Nay.

This one many lefties took hard, as they had convinced themselves for months that Obama was a liberal despite all his rhetoric and evidence to the contrary.

There was an explosion yesterday among the Used at Daily Kos. Fools. That's what they get for treating politics like sixteen year-olds used to treat the release of a Bon Jovi album. But anyway.

The head guy, Markos, had a pretty good piece today that Harrogate invites ye all to read. He denies rhetoric that Hill voted correctly simply to make Obama look bad. He also observes that it was Obama's vote that made Obama look bad, nothing more, nothing less. And for the hat trick, he points out that had Hill been the nominee, she would indeed have voted differently yesterday.

That, folks, is how it works. We all know this but sometimes we pretend that we do not. Look at Gore now, what a good guy he seems to be. Is this the guy we remember from 2000 election, or in the Senate, or during his 8 years as a Veep? What about Edwards? He's awesome, now. As a Senator he was so terrible he'll need another 80 years of life to finish his apologies.

From the Kos:

There's been a great deal of kvetching about Hillary Clinton's FISA vote, that her correct vote on the matter was upstaging Obama's shitty vote, and as such, was making a mockery of "unity" efforts.

Pretty tortured logic, I know.

Regarding Clinton, I have no doubt she would've voted incorrectly were she the nominee. She's shown over the past few years that on every controversial "national security" bill, she has voted incorrectly, whether it was the Iraq War authorization bill, the Kyl-Lieberman Iran bill, or plenty of war funding bills. It's easy to vote the right way when you don't have advisors telling you to "take issues off the table" by betraying things like, you know, the Constitution.

If this marks the end of the triangulating version of Clinton, so much the better. That'll make her that much better a force in the Senate. (Which apparently is necessary given the new triangulating Obama now arrived on the political scene.)

But I also have no doubt that given Clinton's high profile and massive platform, she could've agitated and campaigned against this bill before today, rather than issue a statement during the vote. Dodd and Feingold could've certainly used the support way back when.

Hillary is no hero in all of this. But to complain that her vote somehow undermines Obama? No one here has undermined Obama more than Obama.

He or his advisors (or both) decided that they'd rather capitulate on the issue than face GOP attack ads claiming Obama is weak on national security.

The fact that Obama voted the wrong way isn't Clinton's fault. It's his.

His "see no evil" supporters may have a hard time accepting this truth, but it is what it is. As Bowers says:

Logic aside, I have to wonder why hundreds of people on Daily Kos would desire for people to leave a group that is critical of Obama from the left. This is to effectively ask Obama supporters to stop asking things from Obama. The inability of some to tolerate any criticism of Barack Obama is pretty depressing.