In three parts:
- The current President of the United States campaigned on a platform that included the closing of the prison for international terrorists at Gitmo.
- Gitmo is, in fact, still open. But they’ll get to it Real Soon Now (SPOILER WARNING: they won’t).
- The Right noted at the time that Gitmo was going to remain open. On more than one occasion. We, in fact, told people time again and again and again and again that Barack Obama was not going to close Gitmo. Which means that nobody really has an excuse for being surprised.
Why am I mentioning this now? Isn’t it obvious? Because I’m trolling, that’s why! There’s a lot of people out there who are even now trying to pretend that President Obama ran on closing Gitmo, that the Activist Left pounded the tables and shouted about closing Gitmo, that closing Gitmo was supposed to be the central moral dilemma of our generation… and that the issue of Gitmo was quietly garroted to death in a narrow, dusty room* because it became an embarrassment to the Democratic Establishment. Better and better (from the Right’s point of view): the Activist Left has to pretend that this sort of thing is just fine with them. When we know that it’s not.
Not that it really matters whether the Activist Left is happy, of course. They are, after all, commodities whose utility begins and ends with how much money and underpaid labor they can contribute to the Democratic establishment – or, as the Democratic establishment itself probably puts it in private, ‘their betters.’ And it is a measure of their degradation that progressive activists will simply swallow their bile and go on with trudging in circles. It’d be almost pathetic, except that pity is mostly wasted on people who voluntarily choose to abandon their dignity and all sense of self-respect.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: So why did I bring this all up? – Because it’s my job as a conservative blogger/New Media activist to highlight these sorts of things. Plus, as noted earlier I am a bit of a troll. Or at least I am to trolls what wolfhounds are to wolves…
*Literary reference.
It’s also worthy of note that nobody’s been added to the roster at Gitmo.
Reason? Well, as long as it’s a steady-state condition it can be ignored. If more inmates were being added, it would be just a little too obvious to be papered over.
Instead, we have drone strikes and Special Forces operations that don’t end up with prisoners. The original reason for detaining people was that some of them were innocent and could be let go, and others had information that might be extracted over time. That, apparently, is intolerable. So we kill them instead — exactly as at least some of the Right (including me) predicted.
Ric: what makes you think that we’re not handing off certain prisoners to, say, the French?
Hmmm . . . one of these ‘hand-offs’ went on to murder French Jewish children, n’est pas?
*n’est-ce pas*
Moe, can you illuminate that literary reference for me? It seems familiar but I can’t place it.
Sorry, qixlqatl: I thought that I had given the link. Lepanto, GK Chesterton. I’ll fix it later today.
This is hardly news to most of us liberals. Not happy about it at all. Perhaps Governor Romney will shake his etch-a-sketch and also campaign on closing it (and not intend to either) and fool some people.
So yes, President Obama is a let down in many areas. We’ll still hold our noses and pull the lever for him in November, just like many of you will do so the same for Governor Romney.