GLENN GREENWALD IS UNHAPPY WITH OBAMA’S FISA FLIP-FLOP, and even less happy with the way the leftosphere has given Obama a pass:
In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen — in places where one would never have expected to find them — all sorts of claims about why this FISA “compromise” isn’t really so bad after all. People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration — or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller — suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did. What had been a vicious assault on our Constitution, and corrupt complicity to conceal Bush lawbreaking, magically and instantaneously transformed into a perfectly understandable position, even a shrewd and commendable decision, that we should not only accept, but be grateful for as undertaken by Obama for our Own Good.
Accompanying those claims are a whole array of factually false statements about the bill, deployed in service of defending Obama’s indefensible — and deeply unprincipled — support for this “compromise.”
Everything’s for your own good: It’s the magic of the Messiah. Get with the program, Glenn! Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias is spotted hoping that an Obama Administration will engage in “massive abuses so the right can get what they’ve been asking for.”
Arthur Silber, meanwhile, says that no one is safe.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, a reverse flipflop from Obama on immunity. And, actually, I should give Greenwald credit for not being in the tank on this as so many are.
MORE: Reader Phil Dean emails: “Thanks for linking to Greenwald’s critique of Obama’s FISA
support and the left’s reaction to it. What I think this shows is that all the Bush-is-shredding-the-Constitution rhetoric was, at its core, fundamentally unserious. Greenwald seems surprised by this.” Yes, he does, and yes, it was.