Finally, and Good Luck

Sen. Russ Feingold -- probably the single most praised liberal politician of the last eight years -- declared himself "troubled" by the Obama administration's conduct on secrecy and illegal surveillance and said he would seek to enact legislation to limit Obama's powers as soon as possible. Nancy Pelosi vowed Congressional action to limit the Obama DOJ's position, proclaiming: "we can never have a repetition of what was done under the Bush administration or a continuation of that."

When asked about investigations of Bush crimes, Pelosi also said "we have a little bit of difference of opinion between the White House and the Congress" because the White House "wants to go forward" (Beltway code for allowing Bush crimes to go uninvestigated and unpunished) whereas Congressional Democrats "believe that we have to take a look at what happened[, since] there may be criminal activity."

[...]

The New York Times Editorial Board -- a leading establishment voice opposing Bush radicalism -- today condemned what it called "The Next Guantanamo" and lambasted Obama for advancing "extravagant claims of executive power and perpetuat[ing] the detention policies of the Bush administration."

[...]

And on Thursday, former DOJ official Bruce Fein -- one of the most eloquent (and widely-cited-by-liberals) authorities on the Bush assault on the Constitution -- extensively detailed what he called "an emerging pattern of mightily expansive claims of executive authority by the new administration" as part and parcel of "President Barack Obama's claim to czarlike powers in a perpetual global war against international terrorism."

  Glenn Greenwald

It’s good to be king.

Even for the hardest-core Obama loyalists, it's rather difficult to attribute these increasingly harsh condemnations of Obama's civil liberties, secrecy and executive power abuses to bad motives or ignorance when they're coming from the likes of Russ Feingold, TalkingPointsMemo, the Center for American Progress, Nancy Pelosi, EFF, the ACLU, The New York Times Editorial Board, Keith Olbermann, Jonathan Turley, The American Prospect, Bruce Fein, Digby, along with some of the most enthusiastic Obama supporters and a bevvy of liberal law professors and international law experts -- those who were most venerated by progressives during the Bush era on questions of the Constitution and executive power.

I wonder. Will they rub the stars out of their eyes?

To condemn Obama's executive power and secrecy abuses is not to posit that Obama is the general equivalent of Bush or that his victory over McCain/Palin was irrelevant.

[...]

As Professor Turley put it on Countdown: "It doesn‘t matter if you are a good person doing bad things. You are doing bad things." These secrecy and detention powers are among the most dangerous and tyrannical powers a President can seize, and Obama's attempt to cling to them is deplorable no matter his "motives."

Amen.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.