The Fierce Moral Urgency of Plausible Deniability

Moe Lane noticed something:

They’re readying an executive order right now that will confirm that certain detainees – read: the murderous, terrorist scum that we already weren’t releasing – can be continued to be held indefinitely without trial. The fig leaf here is that the new proceedings (unlike those of the wicked, wicked Bush administration!) will be ‘more adversarial’ – which means whatever you want it to mean, of course – and that lawyers for the murderous, terrorist scum can ask again after the administration refuses to let said murderous, terrorist scum go the first time. Maybe even every year.

As a conservative, my understanding of nuance always catches me up short, so I'm sure there's a reason why the Obama approach is superior to the Bush approach -- my guess is because it involves more chances for appeal, which is yet another jobs program for highly paid public sector civil servants. But I'm sure there's another reason I'm missing. Lane offers a highly cynical guess:

What’s going on here is, of course, that Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would effectively make it impossible to transfer the cases of murderous, terrorist scum to regular American courts. Congress is doing this, earlier Democratic rhetoric to the contrary, because there are actual limits to legislative stupidity, and it’s pretty stupid to put murderous, terrorist scum into a civilian court system not particularly designed to handle it. For that matter, the Obama administration itself is unlikely to have really believed any of the nonsense that it spouted off on the subject in years past… but they have to do something, seeing as progressives are already fairly livid with them over the tax issue.

That can't be right, since there's no way to believe there's any limit to legislative stupidity, as the lame duck Congress has been proving conclusively. As for the idea that the Obama administration is cynical, that's pretty plausible.

In the past few weeks we've seen Democrats essentially throw everything they've said about taxes under the bus, and now this. Are you not amused?