What the defenders of Robert Gibbs don’t get

While I like a lot of what Gene Lyons has to say as a columnist, his defense of Robert Gibbs is something I just don’t get, even after exchanging e-mails on his recent Salon column to that end.

The Politico column I do get, because it’s an “inside baseball” piece.

Let’s set aside, as I told Lyons, Obama the Snooper being possibly worse than Bush, and focus just on domestic policy.

1. Lyons defends Obama on not doing more for gay marriage, while ignoring Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
2. He ignores the Obama Administration’s apparent post-Deepwater collusion with BP to hide how bad the spill was, and more.
3. He ignores that, not in 9 months, but in 16 months, Obama’s not-so-totally-environmentalist Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, had not done a lot to clean house not only in Minerals Management Service, but in the Bureau of Land Management and elsewhere.
4. He ignores the question of whether Obama ever really wanted a public option on the health care bill, and whether the legislation we actually got isn’t calculated to raise 2012 campaign dollars.
5. He ignores similar questions on the financial ‘reform’ legislation.
6. Finally, defenders of Obama in general overlook the question of whether his personality, even more than Bill Clinton’s, is simply not that of a “fighter.” And that’s the key to all of this. Especially when combined with Shirley Sherrod’s lament that he needs to get to know some real people.

I'm taking Lyons as symptomatic of the professional class of neoliberals, quasiliberals, diluted liberals, once-upon-a-time liberals, compromise liberals, Kumbaya liberals, infected-by-political-correctness liberals and more who all feel this way.

And, they too are part of the reason, as I told Lyons, that we need more people to vote Green, Socialist, or whatever. Stop enabling Barack Obama and his ... ilk.

Stop enabling a Democratic Party that keeps tacking right; eventually, we'll have another Grover Cleveland.

Stop getting breathless over Obama's accomplishments, especially if there's white liberal guilt still in the background.

Finally, admit that plenty of Dems were in on the bills/actions that led to the financial precipice that Obama allegedly has reformed, but in actuality hasn't, and along with that, stop enabling the two-party duopoly.

Next test on how "liberal" Obama is, or is not, and how liberal his blanket defenders are?

Whether or not he appoints Elizabeth Warren to run the new consumer protection agency AND what sort of freedom she has, if she is appointed.