Viva Guantánamo! Democrats Shrewdly Keep Notorious Concentration Camp Open To Receive Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld

Today the Senate passed-- overwhelmingly, 90-6-- an amendment by Daniel Inouye "to prohibit funding to transfer, release, or incarcerate detainees detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States," in effect, closing down Obama's plans, for now, to close down Guantánamo. When you see that kind of out of balance disparity between the "ayes" and the "nays" it usually means come crazy obstructionists like DeMint, Burr, Vitter, Coburn, Inhofe, and Cornyn are having one of their daily hourly hissy fits. But... nope; all of them and the other obstructionists voted with the majority for a change. The 6 who voted against the amendment were a half dozen progressive stalwarts, Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

David Herszenhorn had tried making sense of what was going down in yesterday's NY Times.

In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million that President Obama requested to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The move escalates pressure on the president, who on Thursday is scheduled to outline his plans for the 240 terrorism suspects still held there.

In recent days, Mr. Obama has faced growing demands from both parties, but particularly Republicans, to lay out a more detailed road map for closing the Guantánamo prison and to provide assurances that detainees would not end up on American soil, even in maximum security prisons.

The move by Senate Democrats to strip the $80 million from a war-spending bill and the decision to bar, for now, transfer of detainees to the United States, raised the possibility that Mr. Obama’s order to close the camp by Jan. 22, 2010, might have to be changed or delayed.

“Guantánamo makes us less safe,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said at a news conference where he laid out the party’s rationale for its decision, which is expected to be voted on this week. “However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

Reid has either lost his mind or is so distracted by his sinking poll numbers and the prospects of losing his seat that he's become a babbling idiot, unable to distinguish between imprisoning terrorists in the U.S. and releasing them into the public. Maybe he's been listening to too much Fox TV fear-mongering. But even Dianne Feinstein succumbed to the fearmongering-- just minutes after she stood up and denounced it on the Senate floor, pointing out that California is perfectly capable of locking people up securely.

Presumably the senators will be listening to Obama speak about his national security plans tomorrow, unless they've already made arrangements to go listen to Dick Cheney instead. Perhaps Obama can sweeten the pie by adding a proviso that if he can close Guantánamo people will be allowed to bring automatic weapons into elementary schools. Who would dare vote against that? He could even get a powerful bipartisan team like Tom Coburn and Russ Feingold to sponsor it.

Meanwhile, a pair of douchebags paid a call on Tweety today. See if you can count all the lies: