If it's inevitable that they'll come out, and it is, why would Obama do this one-eighty in refusing to release them knowing that his doing so would alienate almost everybody who really want to get this sordid torture chapter behind us? I don't believe for a moment that the real calculus here is that it will inflame negative world opinion. Not releasing them will have a worse effect on world opinion.
If world opinion is the issue, the release of the pictures would add very little to what the world already knows. Not to release them is far more damaging because it makes Obama look as though he's involved in a cover up and he's continuing in the Bush mold–precisely the message you don't want to be sending to the world. The most important message Obama needs to send the world is that Americans repudiate torture and that we will hold accountable anyone who broke torture laws, especially those who were behind the design and the sham legal justification of torture policy.
So if I can figure that out, so can the Obama people. So not to beat a dead horse or anything, but how is it possible to believe otherwise than that Obama and his people don't care about popular opinion; they care only about insider opinion. They don't need popular opinion to govern; they need insider opinion. When you're campaigning it's all about popular opinion; whey you're governing, it's all about insider opinion. When you're governing, you start making nonsense public statements like his justification for not releasing the photos today that any sane person paying attention finds laughable.
The point is that Obama is clearly feeling the heat from insiders in ways that he's not feeling it from us outsiders or from world opinion. He's aware of it, but he doesn't have to worry about it until 2012. And I think it's fairly safe to assume that some of the most important insiders applying this heat are Dem leaders whose main goal in all of this is to cover their butts.
But in this instance, the issues are too big, and they won't be able to squelch this. Everyone in the long run will be exposed, and Obama better figure out with whom he needs to align himself. Because right now he's in serious danger of colluding in an illegal coverup, not to mention that his lame, Orwellian nonsense is just plain embarrassing, and if he's doing this to protect complicit Dem leaders, that's a losing game in the long run.
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UPDATE: Sullivan states the obvious, about the typical MSM take on this. Not that it matters. The MSM will continue to do what the MSM does. They have no motive to do otherwise:
David Ignatius describes the president's about-face on torture photos as a "Sister Souljah" moment. The MSM cannot see the question of torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions as a matter of right and wrong, of law and lawlessness. They see it as a matter of right and left. And so an attempt to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the war crimes they proudly admit to committing is "left-wing." And those of us who actually want to uphold the rule of law … are now the equivalent of rappers urging the murder of white people. And the authorization of torture is reduced, in David's words, to "controversial Bush-era issues such as interrogation."
The elites will do what they have to do to circle the wagons to protect their own.
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