Now, today, the Senate voted to refuse to fund the closing of Gitmo, which makes absolutely no sense at all. What the hell is Gitmo but . . . a prison? I'm waiting, patiently or otherwise, for someone to explain to me, in a way that makes sense, why prison is alright for Charles Manson, Richard Rodriguez (the Night Stalker killer), and (until they were executed) Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacey, oh and of course Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. But the mostly innocent folks picked up off battlefields and plopped for years, effectively incommunicado in Cuba - nope, too dangerous.
Our politicians are silly, inconsequential folk who make no sense.
UPDATE: According to this post at TPM, the fault for this lies at the feet of the Obama White House.
On his first day in office, President Obama signed an executive order calling for the detention facility to be shuttered within a year. Four months later, strategists and Hill staffers say the White House didn't follow through. According to one strategist who advises Democrats on this issue, "things kind of got lost a little in the period between when the executive order was signed and today. There wasn't much direction from the White House to Capitol Hill. There was a breakdown between the White House and Congress."
What happened next will come as no surprise to students of Washington politics. Republicans rushed to fill the ensuing leadership void, and high-jacked the issue entirely. They have insisted for months now that closing the Guantanamo prison is the first step in a process that will result in terrorists walking American streets, and Democrats have met those charges with silence.(emphasis added)
First of all, what do you say to such profoundly stupid things as this? Now, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Democrats are running scared from crap like this; they got in the habit over the years, and rather than point and laugh, they puffed up their pigeon-chests and said, "You know, you're right! They might just stroll in to a 7-11 in my state and order a slushy!".
More revealing than the idea that the Republicans managed to play this issue so well in the absence of intelligent Democratic support and public relations, is the idea that the Senate Democrats got their tender feelings hurt by the White House.
a bigger problem, according to several sources, has been the White House's failure, for months, to co-ordinate strategy and messaging on the issue with Congress, where the bulk of opposition to the plan lies.
"Congress, on the legislative calendar, got ahead of Obama on this," says Ken Gude, who focuses on Guantanamo as associate director for the Center for American Progress."They've established their task forces they're working on their own timeline and the timelines didn't match."
According to Gude, "it's the kind of problem you have when you have two different tracks moving, but not at the same rate."
So, the White House is trying to figure out how to do this correctly, and in the meantime, the Senate, rather than wait, decided to vote on the issue. It seems to me they could have, and probably should have, waited. Getting their panties in a bunch, thanks to the typical Republican oogedy-boogedy, they ran away from Obama's plan, ironically casting the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons as some kind of sieve through which all these "terrorists" will soon pass, raping our men and killing our women, or something like that.
The performance of a few Democratic Senators today in defending both our Federal penal system, and the President's plan was a bit too little and too late. Too bad.
