Redstate

Won't be long now!

By Moe Lane Posted in Congress | FISA | Great Netroot Betrayal | Kneel Before Zod — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Glenn Greenwald: House Democratic leadership: not just complicit but also self-destructive. "Self-destructive" being defined as "not doing what Greenwald tells them," of course: which is doubly funny, as his faction has been notoriously bad at actually doing anything with their supposed mandate from the American people. But let's look at the most fun bits of this rather bitter article about FISA, shall we?

...Hmm, after the fold. And via Just One Minute, by the way.

Anyway, here's the choicest bit:

There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don't actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don't actually care about any of it. That's all a given.

But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

And now, after picking this fight and letting it rage for weeks, they are going to do what they always do -- just meekly give in to the President, yet again generating a tidal wave of headlines trumpeting how they bowed, surrendered, caved in, and lost to the President. They're going to cast the appearance that they engaged this battle and once again got crushed, that they ran away in fear because of the fear-mongering ads that were run and the attacks from the President. They further demoralize their own base and increase the contempt in which their base justifiably holds them (if that's possible). It's almost as though they purposely picked the path that imposed on themselves all of the political costs with no benefits.

The answer to Greenwald's dilemma is in two parts. First off, the reason why Establishment Democrats are ignoring their base on this is because they can: said base has sufficiently painted themselves into a corner with their reflexive hatred of the Right / GOP / George W Bush that they no longer have anywhere else to go, and both they and the Establishment Democrats know this. There will be no real long-term repercussions to Democrats for passing FISA with telecom immunity; merely grumbling and whining, and then the netroots will drop the subject. It isn't even really a matter of forgiveness; forgiveness implies that somebody admitted wrongdoing, and Establishment Democrats won't particularly see the need to even do that.

There is, however, one short-term difficulty from this: money. We're in the middle of a Presidential primary, and it's looking increasingly likely that two Democrats are going to be looking for a good deal of campaign contributions on Wednesday morning (those of you convinced that Clinton's dropping this week may substitute "one Democrat is:" my point still stands). It will not be helpful for either/both candidate if the base is upset over the passing of FISA with telecom immunity, which is why it won't happen until Friday.

See? All perfectly logical. Morally depraved, but logical.