The Obama Revolution that isn't

[UPDATE I and UPDATE 2 below]

I love Keith Olbermann. For the last couple years he has been one of the few people on TV to speak truth to power... other than, of course, the fellas over at Comedy Channel. Now maybe it's just the silliness of the campaign season, but for some reason Olbermann seems to be losing his usual vice-like grip on truth and justice.

Nobody writing opinion today is more correct than Glenn Greenwald. He has been stalwart in pointing out the failures of our government officials, both Republican and Democrat, and he has been a constant fair critic of their craven media enablers. David Gregory dancing with Karl Rove, Sean Hannity blindly supporting whatever it is that Sean Hannity blindly supports... and now Greenwald has directed his pit bull jaws on Keith Olbermann who has inexplicably developed a mancrush on the venerable Democratic Presidential nominee, Barack Obama.

Barack Obama had said that he would filibuster any FISA bill before the Senate that granted immunity to telecommunication companies that broke the law by spying on American citizen. That was January when Senator Obama was pandering to the anti-Bush civil libertarians in his party. Now Presidential Nominee Obama has called the current bill ---which grants immunity to the telecoms--- a "good compromise." And Olbermann, instead of calling him out on this discrepancy, has defended this flip-flop as some necessary ingredient to the election season stew.

Greenwald points out that this wonderful transformation of Hope that seemed imminent with the nomination of Senator Obama, now is appearing more and more like Bush-lite. The same old torture, the same old abrogation of the fourth amendment, the same old jingoist pabulum, the same old faith-based initiatives, etc, etc:

In the last two weeks alone, Obama has done the following:

*intervened in a Democratic Congressional primary to support one of the worst Bush-enabling Blue Dogs over a credible, progressive challenger;

* announced his support for Bush's FISA bill, reversing himself completely on this issue;

* sided with the Scalia/Thomas faction in two highly charged Supreme Court decisions;

* repudiated Wesley Clark and embraced the patently false media narrative that Clark had "dishonored McCain's service" (and for the best commentary I've seen, by far, on the Clark matter, see this appropriately indignant piece by Iraq veteran Brandon Friedman);

* condemned MoveOn.org for its newspaper advertisement criticizing Gen. Petraeus;

* defended his own patriotism by impugning the patriotism of others, specifically those in what he described as the "the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties" for "attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself" and -- echoing Jeanne Kirkpatrick's 1984 RNC speech -- "blaming America for all that was wrong with the world";

* unveiled plans "to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move sure to cause controversy . . . letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions," a move that could "invite a storm of protest from those who view such faith requirements as discrimination" -- something not even the Bush faith programs allowed.

That's quite a two weeks.

With transcendent hope like this we may as well nominate Dick Cheney as Obama's running mate. And Olbermann can serve as Press Secretary.

UPDATE I July 3rd:

Daniel Larison at Eunomia has chimed in on the Obama reversal on FISA:

Having won the nomination, he has probably calculated that his progressive backers will not break with him now and will have nowhere to go (the fear of electing McCain is too powerful for most of them to permit protest voting), so he has positioned himself to avoid confronting either executive power or corporate interests more than he must. He will not yield to his supporters’ demands on this, because I expect he does not see them as a threat to his political advancement, and he will be lauded by “mainstream” columnists for rebuffing the left and showing that he is “responsible” and, yes, “serious.”

This reminds me of the joke about two campers rushing out of their tent when they hear an approaching bear. One camper stops to put on his shoes and the second camper says, "Why bother putting on your shoes, we'll never be able to outrun the bear!" At which point the first camper replies, "The bear? I don't have to outrun the bear."

And such it is. The political maelstrom created by the permanent abandonment of habeus corpus has created a situation whereby the next Democratic President doesn't have to be concerned with civil liberties, except to the extent that he is only slightly more concerned that his Republican opponent. Who else will folks like me vote for if not Obama?

PS (from Larison): Russ Feingold explains why the surveillance program itself is dangerous.


UPDATE 2 July 6:

Even the usually myopic Obama apologist, Frank Rich, has realized that the presumptive Democratic nominee may have "jumped the shark":

For all the hyperventilation on the left about Mr. Obama’s rush to the center — some warranted, some not — what’s more alarming is how small-bore and defensive his campaign has become. Whether he’s reaffirming his long-held belief in faith-based programs or fudging his core convictions about government snooping, he is drifting away from the leadership he promised and into the focus-group-tested calculation patented by Mark Penn in his disastrous campaign for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama’s Wednesday address calling for renewed public service is unassailable in principle but inadequate to the daunting size of the serious American crisis at hand. The speech could have been — and has been — delivered by any candidate of either party in any election year since 1960.

I would argue that instead of a "rush to the center", the abrogation of basic rights granted in the Constitution is rather an example of lurching headlong into the authoritarian camp of the right wing.