IN PARTIAL DEFENSE OF OBAMA. Greg Sargent reports, with respect to Obama skipping the vote condemning MoveOn, that Obama "claims that by skipping the vote, rather than voting against it, he was registering his protest against the vote's triviality." If he's forceful about articulating what a silly kabuki this was, I think it's actually a reasonable position. As a colleague at my other blog points out, though, the Democrat who mosts deserves criticism here is Harry Reid for letting this get on the calendar in the first place. One thing about controlling houses of Congress is that it's supposed to allow you to avoid forcing your members to choose between alienating a political ally and contributing to the Republican strategy of using the troops as a human shield to defend their catastrophically failed war in the first place. --Scott Lemieux