SITUATION NORMAL... The Democratic backpedaling on Guantanamo sucks, but provides a lesson in practical politics. Jennifer Rubin says Obama's plan to close the place is "hugely unpopular." That's not true. But the Republicans have framed the issue cleverly as bullshit about, as the numbskull Rick Moran puts it, "Not wanting terrorists released on American soil," as if Obama is going to help them off the back of a truck onto Main Street, USA. There is no indication that actual citizens think maximum security prisons are unable to hold terrorists (if they do, they should rethink their current accommodations for rapists and murderers), but the gutless Senate Dems are preemptively capitulating.

We'll see what Obama does next, but having been around the block a few times, I wouldn't be surprised to be disappointed -- the fantasies of Mary Katharine Ham and Victor Davis Hanson notwithstanding. They imagine people who voted for Obama will be shocked and demoralized to find their one-time candidate trimming. This is one of the comforts of exile, for which they prepped well back in the late campaign with all their yak about The One and Lightworker. In fact these people were talking about Obama as "Bush's Third Term" as far back as July and even as they were warning against his election. It was a psychological insurance policy, on which they are now making claims.

Most of us, however, were voting for someone who would deliver us from the imbeciles who had been mismanaging the country for eight years. We got that, along with some idiocy, both fresh and vintage. 'Twas ever thus. Reintroducing sanity to our governance was always going to be an uphill climb.