If political betrayals were base hits, Barack Obama would be approaching the record for hits in most consecutive games. This week he kept the streak going by not nominating Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency she willed into being over the past year, allegedly because he’s sure Republicans would block her appointment.

This is a betrayal of all of us, but did you notice how many so-called liberals hemmed and hawed and then swallowed whole the rationale for Obama’s decision? Yves Smith summed up their sad passivity today in a piece called “Why Liberals Are Lame, Part 3”:

What little remains of the left seems to be rallying around Elizabeth Warren, which given the dearth of prominent figures who are serious about standing up for middle class Americans, as opposed to pandering to them and then selling them out, isn’t a bad impulse per se. But they are deploying their energies in quixotic missions or worse, falling completely in line with the Administration’s plan, which has been to… box [Warren] in and render her incapable of independent operation. And in case you wonder what I am talking about, I mean the plan, concocted by the Democratic Party hackocracy, for her to run for the Senate seat now occupied by Scott Brown.

Obama and other high-level Dems have not only marginalized Warren. They have used the excuse of a possible Republican filibuster to cave on almost every issue important to the “quixotic” people who helped vote them into office.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if, just once, the people who supposedly represent us had followed through on what should be done and let the Republicans do their own dirty work? If they’d let the country watch Republicans try to explain why they think Warren isn’t ideally suited to run an agency that’s supposed to protect consumers from dirty-dealing financial companies?

If Obama had pushed for Warren, the country might have learned something about her credentials and importance. Now she just disappears.

Footnote: What are the chances that rednecks like Sen. Richard Shelby will be any more receptive to the appointment of Richard Cordray as CFPB director, given the fact that the GOP is more or less opposed to CFPB’s existence?