Obama: Read my lips -- change? easy boy!

Obama, interviewed by Stephanopoulos on ABC. Some nuggets:

Not everything that we talked about during the campaign, we are going to be able to do at the pace that we had hoped.

What new information came out lately that changed Obama's perception of what's possible and what's not possible?

Wait. I know. He got elected.

On Gaza, mumbling, except

we are putting together the team, so that...we are going to have the best possible people who are going to be immediately engaged in the peace process as a whole

Yes, Dennis Ross. And...

If you look not only at the Bush administration but also at what happened during the Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outcome of an approach.

Indeed, let me summarize it. Israel can do whatever it wants and we're going to help it by making it look like the fault of Palestinians.

We will not torture

Thank you! But

we are going to close Guantanamo

slowly, after we create an alternative structure that looks better but does the same thing.

and

My instinct is, when it comes to national security, we have to focus on the future

and as usual, let the torturers and the people who decided to torture go unpunished. God forbid setting a different precedent. Obviously, the best way to ensure that torture isn't done is not to prosecute it when it is done. Obama's "instinct" is to treat torture the way the Netherlands deal with pot. It's not legal, like under the Bush administration, its just decriminalized. (to be fair Obama leaves open the possibility that he will prosecute the torturers under public pressure. We shall see. )

Finally, Obama is going to get "a medium size dog".

At least that's change you can count on.

ABC

Oh, and then Stephanopoulos went to a round table analysing Obama's comment at which the leftmost commentator was....Thomas Friedman. You can't make this up.