Liberal Media Still In The Tank For Obama!!!1!

Or, you know, not.

[Added] I guess we can unfade the ol' bumper sticker one notch, too, while we're at it, in line with the first couple of paragraphs of this.

DADT Repeal: A Tale of Four Senators

In the years to come, the story of the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will come to be seen as the story of four senators: Obama, Reid, Lieberman, and McCain.

Obama, the one-term wunderkind who ascended to the presidency with astonishing speed and alacrity — and who then did the hardest thing: slowed himself down, shifted the spotlight back to the legislature, recognized that he was no longer the representative of one party but of a whole nation, and began to play what Andrew Sullivan has been calling "the long game." In two years, in the face of a uniformly cynical and hostile opposition, he has managed time and again to win political battles, any one of which can be called major: universal health care, banking regulation, fair pay for women, draw-down in Iraq and ramp-up in Afghanistan, the rescue of Detroit, the prevention of global economic collapse, the end of discrimination against immigrants with AIDS, same-sex benefits for government workers, two massive middle-class tax cuts, and, yes, the repeal of DADT. If, as suddenly seems distinctly possible, the new START treaty is passed this week, his place will be cemented as the shrewdest ex-senator in the White House since LBJ. And his record will be far more kindly viewed by history.

For his part, Harry Reid has quietly become one of the great Majority Leaders in the nation's history: Obama's victories are his, too, and in fact most of the heavy lifting is Reid's alone. And what Reid has done in the current lame-duck session will soon be legendary. The extension of the Bush tax cuts was a piece of brilliant political judo, at once extending tax breaks for the middle class, kneecapping the national GOP on one of its main talking points — Obama's "pro-tax liberalism" — and yanking the Senate GOP from beneath Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's feet. The tax-cut repeal lit a spark of revolt in the Tea Party wing of the caucus, and though Jim DeMint managed to keep it from catching fire, it's still smoldering. McConnell knows he has to deal with the devil on both sides of the aisle now — a fact only underlined by the defection of eight Republicans in support of DADT repeal on Saturday. He is considerably weaker than he could have guessed on the night of November 2.

(Thanks, Ocean.)

But only one notch, for now.