Why Are We Getting All NIMBY on Gitmo?

The most satisfying spectacle of Barack Obama's first days as president has been the way he and his crew have gone about striking the theatrical sets of the terror government to reveal the real America that's been backstage to Bush & Co. all along. But even as the backdrops come down and the kliegs are killed, the mainstream media still wander the stage, reciting the same old lines.

The clearest example of this Potemkin play-acting is the Beltway press "debate" about the closing of the extralegal prison on Guantanamo Bay.

After Obama signed an executive order to close the prison within a year, Republicans started shouting that the remaining 245 detainees are far too dangerous to house in U.S. prisons. House Minority Leader John Boehner and Congressmen Bill Young have been trying to sic it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her liberal bastion of San Francisco with the oh-so-clever suggestion that Gitmo detainees be housed on Alcatraz.

The idea, of course, is to portray her as a NIMBY hypocrite (if not also someone who'd rather protect her gay pals than your family), a point CNN's John King left wafting in the wind on his Sunday show, even though it makes about as much sense as saying Gitmo inmates should be imprisoned in downtown Cleveland's Art Park, which would be the equivalent in Boehner's home state. By accident, King had already aired Pelosi's response on ABC's This Week, when she politely corrected the congressmen: "Alcatraz," she said, "is a tourist attraction. It's a prison that's now sort of like a national park." But King was busy paying no attention to the soundbite behind the curtain. "That was the wrong piece of sound there," he said when the rogue snippet ran. Later, as he turned to the topic of Guantanamo Bay, King burrowed in: "Not in my backyard. Nancy Pelosi already this morning saying not in Alcatraz. Are the detainees going to end up in red states?"