New Version of "Message: I Care."

Jane publishes an email from a touchingly earnest and responsible White House Source disavowing the anonymous White House source who bitch slapped the internet, bloggers, the left, or the gayz(depending on your reading of the context and your faith in Harwood as at all truthful). You know, it strikes me that like the whole problem Obama is having with the gay community, there's really a quick fix for all this.

A) Don't let anonymous bitchery and backbiting flow unchecked. Someone is off message? Get them the fuck back on message. No Drama Obama and his crack team seem to be quite a bit less crack than we were told they would be.

B) Want to mend fences? Mend the god damn fences. See (A), above--punish or rein in the offenders in a very public way or correct the record in a very public way. Which leads to (C):

C) Stop promising and start delivering on the most straightforward and simple of your campaign promises. That's pretty much the most public way of stopping those nasty rumors that you have no intention of delivering. Just do it, already.

The one thing you might just not bother doing? Sending back channel reassurances to selected bloggers and/or gay people who blog. Because if Obama and his team really had the slightest respect for the constituencies involved--the left, bloggers, or gay people, the anonymous speaker's speech wouldn't have meant anything at all. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People are tired of choking down patently false assurances that any day now Obama will do something he promised to do. Something that is relatively easy for him to do. Something that is dramatic and symbolic and important for the lives of his supporters. Like repealing DADT. ** This is not hard. The Obama people are making it hard, and making it harder to accept with their back channel communications. Open the damn front channel and just step forward and do the shit you promised to do without bitching and moaning about how hard politics is, or how fringey and weird your supporters are. Problem solved. See how easy that is?

**Obama should have done it with a stroke of a pen and *then* sent his recommendations on to Congress. He should have pointed out that not only is it like the integration of the armed forces but the willingness of the US army to profit from the services of its closeted gay members while denying them full rights is identical to the US army's use of nisei soldiers while imprisoning their families back home as traitors. It is simply unconscionable and should be done away with by fiat. Society and the army would catch up right quick when the very large number of closeted soldiers were able to safely claim their identities while also performing their duties.