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With the final Senate Democrat vote counted, Barack Hussein Obama has lost another foreign policy initiative and has failed to deliver on yet another campaign promise -- this time, the promise to close the U.S. 'Torture' Base in Guantánamo. From Victor Davis Hanson at NRO...

...I think we now have come to the end to the five-year left-wing attack theme of Bush "shredding the Constitution."

Except for the introduction of euphemisms and a few new ballyhooed but largely meaningless protocols, there is no longer a Bush-did-it argument. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan — and now Guantánamo — are officially no longer part of the demonic Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nexus...

[emphases mine.]

Obama promised cadres of simple-minded Leftists -- those KOS-Kid diarists, the Atriosidiots, the upper-crusty leftys at Sadly, nOObs, Madam Huffingblows -- all are shaking their heads and wondering, what went wrong? We fought for and elected this pretty blow-up doll pezzydent, this vacuous agent of CHANGE, who was supposed to bring on an age of enlightenment; all the world's nations were supposed to adore us; all the tortures and wiretaps and..and...BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW, BITCH~! whaa happened ?

Let's ask Karl Rove what happened...

Flip-Flops and Governance Our president isn't quite as advertised. By KARL ROVE

Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush's military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an "enormous failure" and a "legal black hole." His campaign claimed last summer that "court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists." Upon entering office, he found out they aren't.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate "consequences" for "a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones" on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now's he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a "quagmire" and ordered more troops to that country. He isn't calling it a "surge" but that's what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised to end the Iraq war by withdrawing all troops by March 2009. As president, he set a slower pace of drawdown. He has also said he will leave as many as 50,000 Americans troops there.

These reversals are both praiseworthy and evidence that, when it comes to national security, being briefed on terror threats as president is a lot different than placating MoveOn.org and Code Pink activists as a candidate. The realities of governing trump the realities of campaigning.

There's more; Karl Rove 'splains why BHO has failed to deliver on the home front as well. But, on the home front, we see the potential of great harm to the Nation if BHO's barely-concealed 'reparations' social programs hit the economy...

Mr. Obama campaigned on "responsible fiscal policies," arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the "rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy." In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he pledged to "go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work." Even now, he says he'll "cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office" and is "rooting out waste and abuse" in the budget.

However, Mr. Obama's fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25% increase in the federal government's share of the GDP, a doubling of the national debt in five years, and a near tripling of it in 10 years.

On health care, Mr. Obama's election ads decried "government-run health care" as "extreme," saying it would lead to "higher costs." Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, "It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system."

Making adjustments in office is one thing. Constantly governing in direct opposition to what you said as a candidate is something else. Mr. Obama's flip-flops on national security have been wise; on the domestic front, they have been harmful.

Harmful, indeed. We'll be lucky to survive the damage BHO intends to inflict on our economy.

But really, we knew what he was about. We knew that sitting in that RACIST! Black Liberation Theology Church, listening to Reverend Wright and Father Phleger spew their hatreds for all those years, after having attended Columbia University and slept through the Harvard Law school, then immersing himself in the teachings of Known Terrorist Bill Ayers and playing politics in the nation's worst political hell-hole, that we were getting a man who was a creature of his past. A past that molded him for one thing and one thing only: to assault the Constitution of the United States, and CHANGE! things to a more leftist, socialist, 'feel-good' sort of Nation.

We asked for it, so's here it is.

As far as President Bush, VDH, take it from here...

... what was the hysteria of 2001-2008 about other than simple politics?

I doubt we get any more movies about ongoing renditions, redactions, any more Checkpoint-like novels, any more waterboarding skits and reenactments, any more late-night comedians doing their Bush tapped, intercepted, tortured, renditioned, tribunaled poor suspect X routines.

And I guess as well that the good old days of supposedly flushed Korans in Guantánamo and Omar the poor liberationist renditioned to Cairo are over. We are now in the age of a sober and judicious President Obama who circumspectly, if reluctantly and in anguish at the high cost, does what is necessary to keep us safe.

And we won't see a brave young liberal senator, Obama-like, barnstorming the Iowa precincts blasting a presidency for trampling our values with the shame of Guantánamo, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, military tribunals, Predators, Iraq, etc. That motif just dissolved — or rather, it never really existed.

It short, all the fury, the vicious slander, the self-righteous outbursts, the impassioned speeches from the floor, the "I accuse" op-eds by the usual moralistic pundits — all that turned out to be solely about politics, nothing more.

Nothing more, Democrats.

You've chosen poorly. Actually, you chose a man who has had, at least on foreign policy issues, to grow up.

And, from his moment forward, you won't have President Bush to bash, anymore.

How's that feel, hmmmm?

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h/t PW's The Sanity Inspector