Obama "shredded" the constitution by voting for the revised FISA bill. Yeah, it's in tatters; nobody has any rights any more, and there's zero protections of our privacy and no hope in the future for increasing protections. I call this the "slippery slope" hysteria.

He "caved" on FISA because he's into playing politics, a.ka., lying. Some play. He's drawn heavy flak from both sides. Critics say he blew it.  He says  he  sticking  to his  principles, to honestly deciding  what he thinks  is best for the country, making a close call and assuring us that he will fight against the negative consequences of this checkered bill. "Capitulation," I thought, was going over to the other side, as Hillary did when she voted for the war resolution. She didn't have protections, qualifications, showed no signs of realizing that Bush was a pathological liar. Obama sees through the bad things about the bill and thinks he can ameliorate them. If that's caving in to pressure, then he truly is an idiot, because the pressure came only after the vote.

Here's a big one. He's a "centrist."  Yeah, right.  That's why he's for supporting faith based institutions'  secular programs that are, in principle, supported by many positions taken by the ACLU. Oh, and his vote for stripping the telecom immunity from the FISA bill--all the dyed-in-the-wool centrists' who voted against it must have lost their stripes as he became one of the few true centrists for that moment.  What about his recent intensified support of Israel? That clearly violated his previously expressed sensitivity to the Palestinians. Now he cares not a whit about them. We know that, because we see the shifting and shaping going on, and, well, what else can we conclude? He's definitely a centrist, maybe even no different than Bush, as Choamsky suggests.  Then there's the  promise to  "refine" his Iraq policy. That's worrisome. He could easily turn out to be a closet neo-con. Many suspect that he is a closet radical. One of these views has to be correct. If we add them together, we get, you guessed it, a centrist. Hey, if he looks like a centrist for one month, then he must be one.

He isn't anything he said he was, honest, genuine, progressive. Never mind that his entire life up to this point was dedicated to these principles and that people who worked directly with him have certified that he was.

After all, as Mother Jones recently argued, even Paul Wellstone was swallowed up by the system. He had been a committed community organizer too and discovered that institutional influences were impossible to resist. Actully, Wellstone was unlike Obama in crucial respects. Most notably, Wellstone was given to being entirely disagreeable, which is why Wellstone suffered a power shortage. Obama's power is in his empathy. Still, if Wellstone went the way of all flesh, then Obama must too. The big bad powers that be reach into every politician's heart and put an artificial one in it's place. There's no resisting it. Not!