Banter Media’s own Nicole Sandler won’t give up her belief in death panels-for-freedom:

One who argued with me about this provision in the bill kept referring to a 1 1/2 page summary of the 900+ page bill – and badgered me repeatedly with “did you read it? I read it!..” Well, a summary does NOT tell you what’s in the entire bill.

Reading that, I flashed on Parker Griffith hefting the thousand pages of HR 3200 at his 2009 town hall event with a triumphant insistence that death panels were definitely, positively somewhere inside them, simply had to be in there because the stack of paper was so imposing, and that we should revolt against Obamacare because of those imaginary death panels.

Something like that has been going on with NDAA, an omnibus defense spending bill that has been turned into Teh End of Freedom Act™. So let’s be clear about what the National Defense Authorization Act is, and is not.

The last American soldier to leave Iraq expects to be paid on time. The contractor fixing the air conditioner on that soldier’s radio truck expects to be paid on time. Pentagon purchase managers maintain a supply chain of pens, spare bulbs, diesel fuel, MREs, ammo pouches, uniforms, and a million other things essential to continued day-to-day operations — but contractors only supply this stuff when they get paid on time.

That’s in addition to weapons procurement, training, maintenance, and everything else going on within the Department of Defense. Without money authorized by Congress, this massive machine grinds to a halt.

To be sure, there are plenty of progressives who would read that last sentence and do a happy-dance. Halting the war machine is very important to them — as important as, say, shutting down the federal government and damaging the national credit rating are to a bus full of raging teabaggers. So you will understand that when President Obama threatened to veto NDAA because of the very language that set off this whole fiasco, he was courting a public relations disaster over Constitutional principles. That takes cojones.

Not that he gets any credit, of course.

Imagine, if you will, that a bipartisan group of Senators tried to insert lower gasoline mileage standards into a routine transportation bill, and the president — who has worked very hard to increase CAFE standards — threatened to veto it. That is essentially what happened with NDAA. Look at the membership list of the Senate Armed Services Committee; when you see that Joe Lieberman and John McCain are the moderates in that bunch, their attempt to enshrine indefinite detention into law makes more sense.

Context is everything. With the offensive language now changed, the real story of NDAA begins and ends in Congress. President Obama’s first act in office was to order the closure of Camp X-Ray, the Bush regime’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Congress has been sandbagging him ever since by refusing to fund any transfer of detainees for trial at courts in the United States. Sandler again:

Even if you don’t want to take my word for it… here are a few other people you can trust. Senator Bernie Sanders, in an email after the vote on the NDAA on Thursday wrote…

That would be the Senator Bernie Sanders who voted to keep Camp X-Ray open in May of 2009. If there is a threat to habeas corpus and American freedoms, it’s not coming from the White House; indeed, the problem-makers are the ones being quoted now about their disappointment that the president will sign essential, routine spending legislation. They know what they’re doing: it’s called demagoguery.

Despite our differences, I have always liked Nicole. I ran into her in the hallway at Netroots and jabbered with her for a bit. She was walking toward that infamous panel with Jane Hamsher and Dan Choi: “What to Do When the President is Just Not That Into You.” Writing about the event at TIME Magazine, Michael Grunwald noted:

Somehow…the disillusionment addicts of the left have concocted a narrative of Obama-as-sellout that bears little resemblance to his actual presidency. Democratic infighting is usually described as a “circular firing squad,” but this is more like soldiers fragging their commander in battle because he isn’t screaming loud enough.

Nicole was very excited about the panel, but proffered that I wouldn’t be because I “like Obama.” While it’s true that I like Obama, my objection to the panel had nothing to do with liking him and everything to do with the consequences of poutrage and hyperfocus on his every action; it burns off precious oxygen. Running into Dave Weigel an hour later, I told him that I simply wasn’t interested in discussing the president: we have too much other work to do.

Exhibit A is Sandler’s representative in the House, none other than the nightmarish Allen West. My representative is teapublican Mo Brooks. Both came to office in the midterm wave. Both are happy to keep the scary Muslims locked away forever in Cuba. Both are great arguments against blowing so much smoke over a president. Indeed, with nearly one thousand abortion bills introduced in state legislatures around the country, Scott Walker’s union-busting in Wisconsin, Alabama’s HB56 “papers please” law, Michigan’s emergency manager law, and voter disenfranchisement efforts nationwide, our biggest progressive challenge clearly does not inhabit the White House.

We are at war with oligarchy; Obama is not the oligarchy. We are fighting culture warriors who volunteer to defend the oligarchy; Obama is not a culture warrior. And when Congresscritters insert odious language in a routine bill, let’s remember that Obama is not a member of Congress.

The White House objected to several provisions contained in the National Defense Authorization Act, threatening to veto the bill if they weren’t changed. The blogosphere nevertheless erupted over NDAA, with the usual suspects insisting the president would never veto it because he had asked Congress to clarify its detention provisions. Then yesterday, Congress changed the troublesome sections:

“As a result of these changes, we have concluded that the language does not challenge or constrain the president’s ability to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists, and protect the American people, and the president’s senior advisors will not recommend a veto,” it said.

[...]

The bill that emerged from the conference committee on Tuesday dropped a section from the House version that would have banned using civilian courts to prosecute Qaeda suspects. It also dropped a House-written provision enacting a new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its allies.

But the bill includes a narrower provision, drafted by the Senate, authorizing the government to detain, without trial, suspected members of Al Qaeda or its allies — or those who “substantially supported” them — bolstering the authorization it enacted a decade ago against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Another section would require officials to hold noncitizens suspected of being Qaeda operatives in military custody. The administration had focused its objections on that section, but the panel expanded the executive branch’s ability to make exceptions.

So it’s not everything the president wanted, but it’s also not the end of freedom in America, either — unless that’s what you want to see, like Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY):

If the Senate had wanted to make clear that a U.S. citizen could not be detained forever without charge, it could have said so unambiguously, but it did not. At best, we are shooting dice with our liberties and hoping that a federal court, down the line, will rule that it really does mean what the sponsors of this bill say it means.

I’m sure we’ll see Glenn Greenwald quote Nadler, but not Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), who fought to change the offensive sections of NDAA:

(T)he AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) section in our bill, Section 1021, merely codifies current law. It specifically states, “nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities, relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”  Quite simply, our courts will decide what the law is regarding detention of U.S. citizens.

Remember the “death panels” in health care reform? They didn’t exist, but as long as a very charged-up tea party kept talking about them, they might as well have existed. The same is true for progressives and NDAA: what you think you see is exactly what you want to see, regardless of what the bill actually says. See how that works?

There will be plenty of opinions, but here are three that might actually count: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. They’re the guys backing the president’s veto threat.

The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens. (Emphasis mine)

That fails the most basic test of civics knowledge. DHS is a cabinet-level agency; it has a Secretary, the current one being Janet Napolitano, who answers directly to the president. Congressional oversight hardly “implies” operational planning. This might have given American editors a clue they were printing tripe; as it stands, Wolf’s British editors at the Guardian should apologize for touching off a wasted weekend  in the ‘sphere, which formed a perfectly circular firing squad over this one. More on Naomi’s perfidious wolf-calling here, here, and here.

Manning has allegedly been “tortured” by not being allowed exercise, but this charge turned out to be untrue as well. All of these charges have come through his attorney, David Coombs, and been amplified by the growing Greenwald-Hamsher chorus. The latest outrage: Bradley Manning is required to strip naked each night, which is exactly like waterboarding him. See how that works?

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Neither did I. But according to Michelle Malkin, all of these false equivalencies are a pattern of left-wing terrorism (link is wearing a condom, click at own risk). Of course, she includes “cracker babies,” but her only example of actual violence by actual left-wingers is the Austin Affinity Group that wanted to throw Molotov cocktails on parked police cars at the 2008 RNC Convention. And she was on FOX & Friends yesterday spinning the president’s Tuscon speech.

I hereby reaffirm everything I ever said about Michelle Malkin.

So the president showed up in Quincy, IL today to talk about Wall Street reform and a group of teabaggers showed up to stand with Wall Street. Apparently, they found it amusing that a SWAT team stood across the street. In fact, they smiled and posed for pictures with the SWAT boys behind them — “unbelievable,” is how they described it.

But they’re projecting the tyranny here. I spoke with Sgt. Folkenroth of the Quincy Police Department; he doesn’t think that’s their SWAT team in the picture, but the Secret Service –  which is currently tasked with responding to a record high number of death threats. I’ll be confirming this tomorrow.