"The fierce urgency of whenever"

The Obama administration is taking it on the chin on gay issues, from a surprising quarter: the MSM. Yes, boys and girls, the actual mainstream media -- Time's Jake Tapper, CNN's Jill Dougherty, and Bill Press, to be exact. From Pam Spaulding:

President Obama's absurd strategy on LGBT issues has left his press secretary Robert Gibbs completely unprepared to handle questions from journalists about marriage and DADT. At today's press briefing Gibbs was hit yet again with questions about the administration's untenable, illogical position that our Constitutional scholar President believes that separate is equal when it comes to marriage.

And DADT fares no better:

. . . President Obama has the power by executive order to cease the witch hunts, and to stop the discharges until Congress takes legislative action, as the Palm Center at UCSB report released this week, "How to End 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell': A Roadmap of Political, Legal, Regulatory, and Organizational Steps to Equal Treatment," outlines.

Andrew Sullivan has a follow-up on Lt. Dan Choi that sort of summarizes the president's position on gay issues -- now that he's gotten our votes and our money:

Lt. Dan Cho [is] another patriot who served his country with honor and with skills the military desperately needs, whose reward is to be stigmatized and persecuted for his integrity as a human being. Choi served in Iraq and speaks Arabic.

He was discharged by president Barack H. Obama, whose attitude toward the civil rights movement of his time appears to be "the fierce urgency of whenever."

Obama is a very cautious man, but that can backfire. He is already in danger of losing the leadership position on DADT to Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, who has introduced a bill to repeal the policy in the House. (That bill will be interesting to watch: I'm suspecting it will pass in the House, but Harry Reid is even more cautious than Obama, and certainly displays much less in the way of leadership ability.)

His position on marriage is going to prove embarrassing in short order: Vermont and Maine have legalized SSM in the past month, New Hampshire's bill is awaiting the governor's signature, the New York assembly has passed a bill, with a pledge from the senate leader that it will be introduced as soon as it looks as though they have the votes to pass it, Rhode Island is holding hearings, Washington state has done it's "in all but name" dance (and I expect that to last less than two years: marriage will come to the Pacific Northwest), and even Illinois is working on civil unions legislation (it's iffy here, but we'll have marriage within five years -- there is already pressure to alter the c.u. bill to marriage) -- and Obama and his spokesman are repeating "civil unions" as though it were some sort of magical formula. Sorry -- that's reaching the point where it won't even play in Peoria.

There has been a tendency among Democrats to take the gay community for granted, one that's been abetted, I think, by the national rights groups, who have, when it comes right down to it, allowed themselves to be co-opted. We got results when we hit the streets and started yelling, and stopped getting results when we started attending the right cocktail parties. The grassroots is beginning to take control away from HRC and its brethren (how pathetic is it that I can't even remember the other names and/or acronyms -- and I'm not what you'd call ill-informed; gives you some idea of their presence), and if Obama doesn't want it to get edgy, he'd better move. There's only so much time you can spend catering to panty-waisted old generals who get the vapors at the thought of young virile men in the shower and senators whose constituents believe in keeping sex within the family. They are, when it comes right down to it, a historical burp at this point, and maybe it's time Obama realized that.

(Geez -- I'm really pissy this morning. Who knew?)