What is up with the Democrats? They have decided to go with complete lies to their base in light of the FISA legislation compromise Bush and the GOP just won in the House of Representatives (see my previous posts here on how great this was for conservatives). Are they so confident in their ability to win this year that they are willing to insult and embarrass their base by lying to them about how great this is for their cause?

Even Obama has come out and lauded the legislation, even providing an empty promise to do something he has never done yet in the Senate – fight for a tough cause. He promises he will fight for the trial lawyers and remove the Telecom Amnesty portion of the bill (which has passed the Senate many times now).

What is so fascinating to watch in this stage production by the Surrendercrats and their propaganda allies in the SurrenderMedia is how this fiction is playing out with the far left. So let’s see how how critics view this week’s new production “The FISA Follies“, starting with the Grand Dame of the Liberal Democrats herself; Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

 

The article has only one purpose — to depict the spying “compromise” as a brilliant and heroic centrist masterstroke by Nancy Pelosi to protect us from Terrorists while simultaneously preserving our liberties — and it employs one factually false claim after the next to achieve this. Let’s just take it piece by piece, beginning with the first passage:

A compromise deal to extend the federal government’s domestic spying powers, passed by the House on Friday and expected to sail through the Senate next week, has drawn attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. The right is unhappy at concessions made to protect civil liberties; the left is furious that the Democrats allowed the domestic spying powers to be extended in any form.

It must be a decent and reasonable compromise if both the extremes on the Right and Left are angry about it — except the whole premise is patently false. The Right isn’t attacking the bill at all; they’re ecstatic about it.

…

Much of the latter’s rage has been directed against Nancy Pelosi, the liberal House Speaker who was instrumental in negotiating the deal — attacking her on the internet and virtually shutting down her switchboard with complaints. One blogger called Pelosi “disturbingly disoriented” and said the deal she and her allies have cut will “eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, exempt their largest corporate contributors from the rule of law, and endorse the most radical aspects of the Bush lawbreaking regime.”

Well, it seems that the far left ain’t buying the propaganda being spun by the Democrats, Obama and the liberal news media. I get the impression it is Obama’s performance in this fiction that has the Obamabots most outraged – mainly because it has exposed to them the depths to which Obama duped them:

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.

Why would the Democrats put on such a lame act? Why are they willing to inflame their base to the point of disaffection? The edge the Democrats have right now is in energy, not issues. Are they so confident (or arrogant) that they think they can insult their base’s intelligence like this and expect them to come to the polls all excited in November?

Clearly so. The fiction is not fooling anyone. The GOP is still cheering (and now snickering), the moderates have common sense solutions which goes beyond what most had hoped for and the far left has egg on their face. I must note this comment from the first Greenwald link above:

GOP House Whip Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond boasted in the NYT that they and the White House got more than they even wanted. The most extreme right-wing supporters of authoritarian Bush surveillance policies are praising the bill, from National Review‘s Andy McCarthy (the bill “is a good one”) to Time’s 2004 Blog of the Year, Powerline (“at last, a decent FISA deal”). 

The fact this charade is being coordinated between Pelosi and Obama is also very telling.  All expectations are this compromise will fly through the Senate.  So Obama’s (and Majority Leader Harry Reid’s) promises to stop something they could not stop the last 2-3 times are simply more faux glitz to hide the pending final result.

Did the liberal elites of the Democrats decide they had to cut their losses on FISA so they could try and surrender Iraq to our enemies?  I agree they could not deny the threat from terrorism (the FISA issue) and the success in Iraq (the troop withdrawal issue) at the same time and look competent (let alone sane).  So did they decide to surrender on FISA to fight on over Iraq, which will see troop withdrawals this year as a result of our significant successes over the last year?  At least the can try to pretend the Iraq results were due to their idiotic dire predictions of doom (though I doubt anyone would buy it).

Or maybe they realized this is the year al-Qaeda needs to attack us again to appear relevant, and they dared not be on the wrong side of that kind of event if it happened?

Or maybe this is the beginning of the process of throwing the far left under the bus?  Obama and Pelosi have only 2 months to start redirecting the democrat party from the fringe to the center.  They will lose the debate on Iraq as well, as we saw in the latest funding bill for the war effort, which the House passed also to the consternation of the far left.  Maybe this is just one of many heart breaking actions against the will of the Democrat party’s far left base that will have many wondering how they could have put so much faith into what are, in the end, opportunistic and power hungry politicians.

Update:  Meant to note this interesting element in the story line:

Stonewalling the Administration and letting the surveillance powers expire could have cost the Democrats swing seats they won in 2006 as well as new ones they have a chance to steal from Republicans this November. “For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue,” says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it. . . .

Yep, power is important.  But is it that important?  Personally, since I agree with the changes whole-heartedly, I see victory on the policy.  If that victory came due to leveraging the greed for power of the Democrats, then so be it.  Politics is not bean bag.  The fact is America is on the side of the GOP on this issue and the dems know it.  So they through their base under the bus (again) to hold their positions.  No surprise there – that’s how the GOP lost their base!

Tags: 2008 Election, FISA, Iraq, NSA, Obama, Pelosi