By Any Means Necessary

Ensign Ed is always too quick on the trigger with his bipartisan praise:

Last April, I complimented Barack Obama for his principled stand against the corrupt practice of providing “street money” to political organizers in Philadelphia.  He insisted that his new kind of politics didn’t allow for the cash-on-demand tradition in Philadelphia, and that his organization would remain voluntary.  Even with ward bosses playing the race card against him in response — claiming that Obama spent his money at “white” television stations instead of on black volunteers through street money — Obama held firm.

Strangely enough, the Chief Stumbling Block has now changed his tune on the grassrootiest mode of buying - and fabricating - votes:

According to U.S. Representative Bob Brady, the local Democratic Party chairman, Senator Barack Obama’s general-election presidential campaign in Philadelphia will be run differently from his primary operation, which relied more on volunteers than on Democratic ward leaders and did not provide street money on Election Day.

“We’re not going to pay for votes or pay for turnout,” Obama said before the Pennsylvania primary.

But Brady said that the campaign has promised street money to pump up turnout in November. And now that Obama is the official nominee, his campaign will team up with the city’s Democratic ward leaders, who traditionally help get out votes.

Yeah, it's another flip-flop. Yeah, it's another of Lucifer's lofty, high-falutin' principles heaved overboard like a corpse into a cold, isolated, murky lake.  But did you really expect him to hold to that impossible idealism if he wasn't at least twenty-five points ahead in the polls?

Here's all you need to know to understand this latest reversal:

1) In April, Obama held firm on not sullying his campaign with cash-wad-armed street hustlers;

2) Obama lost the Pennsylvania Donk primary to Hillary Clinton by double-digits, sparking a nominating season-closing losing streak that only the ubiquity of the Democrats' proportional representation delegate rules prevented from becoming a total collapse;

3) Obama - assuming that Hillary doesn't succeed in submarining the nomination away from him - is in a general election dog-fight with John Sith McCain instead of the landslide cakewalk everybody expected;

4) Unless he pulls some miracle surge out of his nether regions, another loss in Pennsylvania will almost certainly cost BO the election.

There's only one principle, and one principle only, that Barack Hussein Obama will not abandon: He'll do ANYTHING to win.

Come to think of it, that's most of why he isn't winning....

UPDATE: 'nother case in point: