I was reading in the Times how "closing Guantánamo has faded as a priority" for this administration, along with... seemingly everything else.  I have to admit I have no earthly idea what these guys are doing.

Guantánamo is a painful case in point.  I would argue (and have argued) that it is actually a greater sin for Obama and his administration to allow the prison at Guantánamo to remain open indefinitely, which seems to be their game plan, than it was for the Bush/Cheney regime to open it in the first place. 

When you start with the premise of consciousness of evil — when you know that something is evil, have acknowledged that it is — you become complicit in evil in a way that those who pursue it as a matter of course without adequate self-knowledge to understand the implications aren't.

It is curious how it is so much easier to tear almost anything down than to build it up, except a prison.  I guess that's the point, eh?

Unfortunately — tragically, really — Obama's failure to act is becoming his signature style.  The reaction to the ongoing Gulf disaster (which the some are now saying could result in a catastrophic tsunami) for example.  Even many of his most ardet supporters on the campaign trail, who lauded his ability to inspire, are coming to realize that inspiration without action, or to put it another way, "hope without change" is a recipe for disaster these days. 

The President has taken up many of his predecessor's pet causes (state secrets, rendition and torture, and the War in Afghanistan, to name a few), but has seemingly learned nothing from his tactics. Masters of diversion, the Bush-Cheney regime consistently got what it wanted by creating cascading crises as cover.  

They would never have let the natural disaster unfolding in the Gulf go to waste.  Remember Hurricane Katrina?  It was only two days after Katrina peaked that the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) changed its policy to basically allow Big Oil to determine its operations’ environmental impacts, to the point of letting the oil companies fill out their own inspection reports. 

It was also in August of that fateful year that the administration laid the groundwork for the current total destruction of the Gulf by pushing through the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that (as Kate Sheperd of Mother Jones succinctly put it) "provided $1.5 billion in direct payments to companies to incentivize drilling in deepwater wells, curtailed the power of states to oversee oil and gas exploration off their coasts under the Coastal Zone Management Act, ... [and] weakened environmental protections for offshore drilling, making it easier to exclude a broad range of exploration and drilling activities from analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act." 

A then up-and-coming Senator Obama voted aye — twice.

There are those who still believe Obama's methods are so subtle no ordinary mortal can parse them.  Is he a ninja, employing the age-old diversionary tactics of yoja no jitsu, where the ninja assumes the appearance of a weak creature to penetrate the enemy's defenses? 

Although some few hold-outs still have some hope Obama's Ninja Diplomacy will win in the end, for the rest of us there's no more room for the benefit of the doubt on issues like Gitmo.  If you're going to play ninja, let's see some results.  Take a reverse-tip from Dick Cheney, the ultimate Evil Ninja:  sometimes you've got to use a crisis to end a crisis.