It is simply shocking that the president of the United States has some secrets he wants to keep.
What’s funny is that as Obama the president takes over, to any small degree, from Obama the campaigner, his supporters are loving the opportunity to pretend objectivity by lambasting him on relatively minor issues, all the while still supporting him, and not acknowledging their own complicity in failing to ask him any tough questions DURING the campaign. This is all pretty small beans. Every president tries to preserve and extend presidential power after entering office. And maybe, just maybe, Obama has learned some things from intelligence briefings since taking office, things Bush knew and couldn’t discuss, that have altered our new president’s perspectives on a few matters.
But journalistic credibility is hard to come by these days, so those still in the tank for the annointed one have to make lots of noise on minor matters to hide their fecklessness in serious reporting on his economic policies, foreign tour debacles, and the like.
Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right — which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration — large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann — who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) — devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder’s DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration’s use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and — worse still — a brand new claim of “sovereign immunity” to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.
The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here. Just as revealingly, the top recommended Kos diary today (voted by the compulsively pro-Obama Kos readership) is one devoted to attacking Obama for his embrace of Bush/Cheney secrecy and immunity doctrines. Also, a front page Daily Kos post yesterday by McJoan vehemently criticizing Obama (and quoting my criticisms at length) sparked near universal condemnation of Obama in the hundreds of comments that followed. Additionally, my post on Monday spawned vehement objections to what Obama is doing in this area from the largest tech/privacy sites, such as Boing Boing and Slashdot.
In the meantime, too much of this post by Greenwald seems to be about what a cool guy he is, and how influential he is.
I wonder when the Left media will get around to serious consideration of the disastrous spending Obama is trying to ram through Congress? Does anyone think they’re ever going to criticize him three or four times as much as they did Bush, for having deficits three or four times the highest Bush ever had, and doing it year after year (in even the rosiest scenario for the “out years”)?
But to the Left, the growth of government is virtually an intrinsic good. The bigger the better. So to divert us, let’s consider again the amazingly disgusting scene of a president keeping secrets.
Sigh.
