I am not here to defend Obama's evident willingess to vote for a bill with telecom immunity if he can't get one without it.  I do, however, want to suggest that we owe it to ourselves to reserve judgment for a bit before we go loudly putting him onto our "dead to me" lists.  There will be plenty of time for recrimination later, if you're so inclined, and I  may be so inclined myself, eventually.  However, the commenter who wants to retain a reputation (deserved or not) for insight, would do well  to hang back for a bit and wait for this thing to play all the way out  before he or she starts the rending garments and throwing of dust into the air. 

I don't want to suggest we should have blind faith in him.  That's not a good thing, no matter what those who've caricatured his supporters these last several months say about us.  I'm also not foreclosing the possibility that he's about to fuck up hugely, albeit not in a way that will hurt him politiclly. 

There are, however, a few points that seem to have been overrlooked in all the emoting that may be worthy of consideration.  

First consider the likely reason for that a delay in saying anything. To those who live their lives on Internet time, it was infuriating and intolerable. Between the time when news of the compromise broke and yesterday, there was much indignant huffing and stamping of feet.  "What's the hold up?  It's all over the Internet that the bill has a transparently pretextual path that inevitably ends in telecom immunity built into it?  What more do you need to know?" 

Well, personally, knowing what I know about him, and about how he's behaved in the past, I think he wanted to know what else was in the bill.  That's a funny thing about lawyers, and particularly law professors.  Presented with law, or proposed law, they generally prefer to actually read it, or at least read over it, before making judgments about what it says.  I suspect he also wanted to elicit opinions from people he respects, and gather information from people who know stuff we don't--he's in a position get most  questions he has answered now, you see.  Obama has shown a certain sure-footedness in distinguishing what matters have to be dealt with in Internet near-realtime time frames, and what matters can be dealt with with the tradtional TV news cycle timeframe. 

That said, I do not claim I can see into his motives. This may be crassly political.  It could be that he sees he can't stop it and would rather be seen supporting it than be seen not stopping it.  It could be that he read the bill and decided that it gave the president powers that he wanted to have after he wins.  Possibly, his motives are more lofty.  It could be that, he read it and made a considered judgment a constitutional scholar that the provisions in the bill that required the president to get a warrent from the FISA court were more important than letting the telecoms off the hook for enabling warrentless spying.  He may even have decided that we really need the other provisions in the law, even if it costs us giving the telecoms immunity. 

There are two things about his motives, however, I do feel confident about.  One is that he's not doing this because he's scared of being characterized as "weak on terrorism" or because he's pandering to the middle.  I know that because I know a) that he knows that will happen no matter what and b) he's already shown that there is nothing they can throw at him in that vein that he cannot successfully turn back around on them.  Second, I am confident he's not kow-towing to the telecoms.  One thing the fundraising phenom has done is free him from the need to kowtow to anyone, including us, btw--we all give, but everyone's donation is a drop in the bucket.   The telecoms can't buy him the way they bought people like Jay Rockefeller.  The individual contribution limits, combined with the scale, make that impossible. 

I do believe we should consider whether opposition to telecom immunity has become such an integral part of the netroots orthadox catachism that we've forgotten what that fight is actually about. Let us refresh our recollections.  There are two components to this fight.  First, telecom immunity is wrong in and of itself because a federal court has already decided that they should have known what they were doing was illegal and an industry, especially a powerful one, should not be permitted to go to Congress and brazenly buy itself a law nullifying a court decision after the fact.   Let's not be naive.  Plenty of laws are bought and paid for.  All of our intellectual property law, for example, patent, trademark and copyright, is flat-out written by the industries it is supposed to govern and they flagrantly buy that power with campaign contributions.  Telecom immunity, however, is a whole different level of wrong and, in any case, is exactly the kind of thing Obama's movement is supposed to be about ending.

However, let us not forget why the telecoms put on their sensible shoes, grabbed their Visas and went immunity shopping in the first place.  The lawsuit they are trying to shut down was not started because people thought the telecoms needed to be punished for breaking the law--they're not really even seeking much in the way of damages or sanctions.  The lawsuit was started because the EFF and the ACLU decided it was the only means at their disposal to find out what Bush was up to.  Bush isn't demanding telecom immunity because he gives a rat's ass about the telecoms.  He's doing it because he wants to cover his own rat's ass. 

These are related, but separate, things.  Especially if you are Barack Obama at this particular moment in time.  See, the first thing, the wrongness of allowing an industry to buy itself ex post facto immunity will always be wrong, but as to the other, well the oddmakers are giving two to one that, in almost exactly seven months, Obama will himself know all that can be known about what Bush was up to.  So, I can see how, at this point, uncovering what Bush was up to just isn't as big a priority for him, or for that matter, for the Democrats in Congress, as putting some brakes on what he's doing now.  Possibly, he really thinks the inherent wrongness of telecom immunity is a nasty, bitter, pill that can be swollowed for the price of getting some Article III supervison back into the spying program.   

However, if that's what's really going on here, I'll puzzle out how I feel about after it happens.  For now, I'm simply choosing to not foreclose the possibility that there's more going on here than I know.  Time and again, Obama has shown us that he plays a deep damn game.  What he's about has generally been completely opaque to the Republicans and to Hillary's campaign.  What he's really doing has routinely gone right over the MSM Talking Heads, er, heads.  It has frequently eluded the most astute commenters on left-of-center blogs,  Sometimes it has not even been discernable by the most respected and prescient  bloggers.  This may be one of those times.

Or not.  He may just be fucking up royally.  He may even be finally revealing himself to be the Antichrist and this could be the beginning of the tribulation (though if the Rapture has already happened, it sure seems like a lot of fundementalist assholes got Left Behind).  I'm just saying that, for me, this is one of those times when I'd rather pass on an opportunity to tee up an emotionally satisfying "toldja" than risk saying something that will make me look and feel foolish later.