From last night’s “All-Stars.”

On the state of health-care legislation:

Look, it is about politics but it’s mostly, despite what Obama also said yesterday, it’s about him. It is entirely about him.
It’s not about cost control, because all of the plans are going to raise the costs.
It’s not about improving quality. If anything, these machinations are going to decrease the quality of American health care.
And it surely isn’t about efficiency–the inefficiency that has accrued in the health care system as it developed over the decades–because it’s going to introduce all kinds of new commissions, new regulations, all kinds of inefficiencies.
It is about Obama. This is [the] signature achievement he has promised. If he doesn’t have it, if he doesn’t have a bill, any bill, at the end of the year, his presidency is going to be seriously damaged, and all the mystique will disappear. Which is why…I’m absolutely sure that at the end of the year, he will have a bill. It will have the words “health-care reform” on it. It will be extremely watered down: All of the ballast that the Blue Dogs were protesting against, including, I’m sure, the public plan, is going to be thrown overboard.
And it will be a very weak version of what we have now, probably even harmless–which will be a great American achievement. But he’s going to have something. He won’t have it in August, but he will have to have it at the end of the year.
Democrats understand his presidency is over if he gets nothing.

On the Obama administration admitting it will miss deadlines for handling Guantanamo detainees:

This is where he hands his sword over to the Bush administration and concedes that he was wrong. Of course, he never will [so concede]. But, in fact, his deeds, as Mara indicated, will be a concession, because in the end he will end up at the same place as the Bush administration under a different name.
And this comes under the heading of the humbling of a singularly arrogant administration and president. Having attacked Bush on interrogation and on Guantanamo for over a year and a half, as president he goes around and grandly announces he will close Guantanamo and he’ll stop all of the torture.
And now his own commissions are stuck on this, and they’re stuck because, in the end, Obama is going to have to commit what in the eyes of the left, his constituency, is the ultimate crime–indefinite detention.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed is going to die in American custody whether it’s in Guantanamo or on American soil, it doesn’t matter. And that’s going to be under the Obama administration and its successor. And that was the main issue on which Democrats had attacked the Republicans, and now it’s going to be a huge concession.
And as Mara indicated, the beauty of this is that we are going to end up with a national consensus. Democrats are going to agree tacitly–by action and not in word–that the Bush administration had it right, and they will end up with a version of the Bush policy.