Gitmo: cluelessness at at the Washington Post

In Today's Washington Post, two reporters, Peter Finn and Anne E. Kornblut, write a report struggling to reconcile what liberals see, on one hand, as the overwhelming righteousness of closing the Guantanamo detention center with, on the other hand, Pres. Obama's disappointing failure to close it as promised. Ultimately they conclude that it was the failure of Obama to stand up to the Republican spin machine:

In hindsight, officials said, they should have taken the budding Republican narrative more seriously. “We weren’t very effective at rebutting it,” one senior official said.

Finn and Kornblut acknowledge the pain that the failure to rebut the Republicans caused among the liberal true-believers in Obama's cabinet. For example, they write:

[O]n the the day Obama announced that he would seek reelection, a clearly crestfallen Holder took to the lectern at the Justice Department to scuttle the federal prosecution of Mohammed, which he once expected would be the “defining event” of his time at the helm of the department.

In their lengthy article, Finn and Kornblut fail to acknowledge, however, the two obvious truths that have emerged from the past two years of debate on Gitmo:

• Americans, Democrat and Republican alike as evidenced by a 90-6 vote in the Senate, do not want the world's worst terrorists transferred to US soil.
• The rest of the countries around the world do not want them either.

That pretty much dooms the liberal dream of closing Gitmo. Of course, if you work at the Washington Post, you can ignore that and instead blame the petty politics of partisan Republicans.