Being Shived in the Showers

Which is about how I feel about this piece (sent to me by a reader) that the Obama Administration is at peace with the expansive reading of the "state secrets privilege" of the Bush Administration.

Let me recap some history from a decade or so ago. Once upon a time there was a president named William Jefferson Clinton. In the midst of his 1996 re-election campaign, a campaign he was clearly leading, the troglodytes in the party of Hoover, who controlled the Congress, passed a gay-bashing bill called the Defense of Marriage Act (which should have been called the No Faggots Can Marry Act). Ol' Billy, who damn near invented the bit of political geometry called "triangulation," signed the bill into law. That was, by far, not the only bit of political backstabbing of allies engaged in by Clinton.

It was around this point that many traditional Democrats who would have backed Clinton began backing away from him. I heard comments that people preferred to deal with enemies in front of them than backshooting allies.

So then came the Lewinsky Affair in 1998. Many of those Democrats who felt that Clinton had earlier betrayed them kept their hands in their pockets and refused to rush to Clinton's defense. Oh, a lot of party loyalists did defend Clinton, but a lot of people did not.

President Obama needs to take that lesson to heart. He is indeed the president of all Americans. Maybe he doesn't have to be the sort of "base-butt-monkey" that George Bush was, but he should think about talking to those whose support got him to the job he has now, that is, if he wants us to be there when he needs us.