Glenn Greenwald pulls no punches when he calls out the shameful behavior of the Democratic leadership this past week, in particular towards Steny Hoyer who boasted to Politico.com that the Democrats had achieved a glorious compromise.

To hear Hoyer tell the story, one would think that he fought the battle of the Alamo, and survived! In reality, Hoyer was one of the men who left the Alamo before the battle began, accompanying the women and children who were also unable to fight.

Except that Hoyer was able to fight. Instead, he chose not to.  Hoyer willingly failed to stand up for the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

As they have done so many times before, the Democrats have rubber-stamped Bush’s law-breaking by making every crime he has committed “legal”.  It is still unconstitutional behavior, no matter how Hoyer wants to portray it. The United States does not have just have a “Bush problem”.  We have a “Democratic enabler” problem as well, and these enablers are 100% as guilty (or more) as the Bush crime syndicate.

Glenn explains that the nature of a compromise, is, well… compromise – not total capitulation to the other side’s demands (emphasis mine):

Regarding Pelosi’s claim that the Democrats won “significant concessions” — a claim repeated by Hoyer in the Politico article — Ponnuru says: “If that’s what they want to tell themselves, fine. It sure looks like they got rolled.”

It looks that way because that’s what happened. Who exactly do Pelosi and Hoyer think they’re fooling with these self-glorifying claims that they stood down the Republicans and extracted concessions? Dick Cheney couldn’t wait to endorse the bill and GOP leaders and right-wing polemicists haven’t stopped boasting about how completely Democrats capitulated on what had been one of the most scandalous aspects of the Bush administration — the fact that he got caught breaking the law when spying on Americans.

Doesn’t it rather obviously compound, rather than mitigate, the Democrats’ humiliation to try to pretend this was some great victory when everyone can see how absurd — pitifully so — that claim is?

The Politico article (which, incidentally, misquotes this post of mine completely) also says this:

Despite those efforts, liberal activists were furious at what they view as a sellout by House Democrats on FISA, particularly on the retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.

Two liberal groups, Blue America PAC and ColorofChange.org PAC, ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post spelling out their displeasure with Hoyer. But Hoyer has been targeted by the left in the past — MoveOn.org has run radio ads against him — but he was reelected with nearly 83 percent of the vote in 2006, and he’s never drawn less than 65 percent of the vote.

“I am aware of it,” Hoyer said of the loud criticism from progressive groups of the FISA agreement. “When you try to reach a compromise, the people on one side or the other are not pleased.”

Hoyer has this backwards. The nature of a “compromise” is that neither side is happy with the outcome. Where, as here, one side is ecstatic and the other side is furious, that, by definition, is not a “compromise.” It is, as Russ Feingold correctly says, a full-scale “capitulation.” Hoyer’s bill gives the two gifts the administration most wanted — the power to engage in “vacuum-cleaner” surveillance of communications over U.S. telephone and email networks with no warrant requirement (and no required connection to Terrorism) and a guaranteed end to the telecom lawsuits.

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com.