Is Der Speigel Getting The Real Obama Now?

It seems like Der Spegiel has started to figure out The One. Or at least the contradictory nature of President Obama. Clearly still anti-Bush, the paper comes to some startling revelations (to itself at least) that President Obama has made some promises he can't keep.

Specifically they have become a bit disillusioned on Guantanamo prisoners, their release and the implications of actually treating them like terrorists rather than American citizens. Parenthetically, it appears Germans too do not understand the differentiation between the rights granted to enemy combatants and the rights granted to American citizens.

Or at least Der Speigel still doesn't get it. They seem to have also fallen sway to Obama's Jedi mind trick and they truly expected he could deliver on his promises without so much as raising a sweat. If it had been that simple, somebody in the Bush administration would have come up with the solution. Obama isn't the only person in America with synaptic fibers firing.

You wouldn't think it would be that hard for Der Spiegel to realize that Obama made promises he could not possible keep without some sort of difficult decision needing to be made.

Obama has never categorically rejected the military commissions ...Any return to using such military commissions would be a major disappointment to human rights groups who were hoping that Obama's election signalled a new era in America's handling of terror suspects. As German editorials show on Monday, frustration across the Atlantic is equally high.

In an editorial entitled "Obama's Great Mistake," the center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Obama's people certainly imagined things differently. But reality has caught up with them. ...Obama is thus considering holding on to the military commissions with a couple of extra rights for the suspects. Bush light, so to speak...Obama is thus discrediting both himself and the US. "

The left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung writes:

"The US government has asked Germany to accept former Guantanamo prisoners.
Exactly the same government is apparently planning to continue the military commissions to try those prisoners. One could hardly be more contradictory."

"It is the same tactic that President Barack Obama has already used when it came to the torturers from the CIA -- punish with one hand, stroke with the other. Whenever he takes a step forward, he stumbles backwards as well. That will likely be enough to disappoint all those Europeans who had expectations that Obama would be an almost messiah-like healer. It was expected that he would demolish all of the ugly monuments from the Bush era and then, together with Al Gore, plant a Garden of Eden over the top, through which he would drive fuel-efficient compacts from Chrysler."

Okay, so Germany doesn't completely get it, at least not from the left. But over there, liberals are seeing Obama more for what he truly is than the left here is seeing him in that way. Obama's goal is clearly about maintaining power for Barack. Perhaps the liberal voters of America have truly become Obama's useful idiots.