I’m shocked.  Stunned.  Stupefied.  Flabbergasted.  This just isn’t possible.  How can a “god” fail to get rid of something that should have, from day one, only taken the stroke of a pen, the law be damned?

Is The One a lame duck after all?:

The Obama administration is not pursuing the use of an executive order to shutter the Guantanamo Bay military prison after officials concluded that it would not be a viable strategy, sources familiar with the deliberations said.

Why not?  It worked for cap & trade, and two amnesties, and several other prominent items on the Obama Agenda.  What made closing Gitmo any different?

The conclusion, reached by administration officials, narrows the already slim chances that Barack Obama can fulfill his pledge to close the notorious offshore prison before leaving office in January.

The White House has said repeatedly that Obama has not ruled out any options on the Guantanamo center, which has been used to house terrorism suspects since it was set up in 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Right up until now, it would seem.  But again comes the question: Why?  It simply does not fit the eight-year pattern of the Obamidency.

Captain Ed suggests that the obstacle was that keeping Gitmo open had bipartisan support:

Without a path through Congress, there would be very little the White House could do to close the facility now, and almost no time in which to do it. Obama could attempt to close the entire Guantanamo Bay naval base and hand it back to Raul Castro, but that would almost certainly require Senate approval — and would create a political firestorm the likes of which have not been seen since the Panama Canal treaties of 1977. The Democrat-dominated Senate barely ratified the two treaties, with a single vote to spare on both. Obama wouldn’t be able to get any such treaty through this Senate, and attempting to try it without Senate ratification could trigger a constitutional crisis that could swamp out Democrats’ hopes in the upcoming election.

You mean like the constitutional crises that ensued after every previous use of O’s pen and phone and putter?  How about the Iran nuclear “deal” that was a treaty requiring two-thirds Senate ratification until that same GOP Senate decided to do Red Barry the favor of pretending it wasn’t and flipping that threshold to requiring a two-thirds vote to reject it?  Have those impeachment hearings begun yet?  Or did they already take place and I, the full-time blogger and podcaster, somehow missed them, unless they were shoehorned into the preceding three weeks of my “working vacation”?

C’mon, man.  Severing power from legal authority is the core of the Obama legacy.  Sure, Senate approval is required for a lot of things, constitutionally speaking.  But since when does Barack Obama give a frog’s fat leg about the Constitution?  Especially during his second term, when he was past having to even pretend to care about what the American people thought about anything, much less their elected representatives on either side of Capitol Hill?

Piffle.  If Barack Obama had, at any time in the past eight years, really wanted to shut down Gitmo, he would have done so, by whatever means necessary.  And he did not.  But does that mean he never truly wanted to cease housing captured jihadists there, or did he have another use in mind for the facility?  Perhaps the incarceration of….political prisoners?  Which in turn raises the question of whether he’s changed his mind about a coup de tat and self-installation as president-for-life.  Has that long-term plan/plot become something he’s simply too lazy to bother with, preferring to hand everything off to Mrs. Clinton, who will certainly not lack any enthusiasm for that tyrannical task?  It would definitely indicate his level of confidence in her ability to dispatch Donald Trump without more than a token modicum of effort.

I’m still not fully buying this story.  It’s just too difficult for me to believe that his ideological thirst for power could ever be slaked.  And besides, I’ve never been to the Caribbean.  At least the tab for that “working vacation” would have been picked up by the feds.

But there’s still a chance.  Stay tuned.

I was born in the small town of Wenatchee, Washington in the early 1960s, and grew up in that last outpost of Norman Rockwell America. Graduating high school with honors, I attended Washington State University, where I earned a cum laude Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration. I added my CPA certification a year later. After four years in the salt mines of public accounting I seized the opportunity to get into accounting management in private industry, where I served in the mortgage/real estate, technology, and food manufacturing industries for twenty-one years. After that career was laid waste by corporate politics, I bided my time, subsisting on unemployment compensation and then personal savings, and the hope that the ship of Constitution Education Enterprises LLC would finally come in. That pipe dream now having also acrimoniously ended in the ongoing Trumpocalypse, I am what you call a "free agent". On the home front, I am twenty-eight years into the matrimonial salt mines, and have raised two precocious kids, one of whom is well on the way to conquering the world of music and theater, the other one of whom might be a future YouTube entrepreneur.

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