The Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain

As The New York Times Turns

by Hal_10000

Jeez, I leave the country for a couple of weeks and things go crazy.  Not one but two pro-Obama publications are—gasp!—criticizing him for embracing Bush policy.  The latter is the “legitimate” New York Times (as opposed to the illegitimate Fox News), usually a reliable source for using xeroxed Democratic press releases as news articles or editorials:

The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.

We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.

They detail several troubling actions by Obama—most notably the continuing threats against the UK for making the Binyam Mohamed documents public.  These documents detail the extreme torture—way beyond waterboarding—that Mohamed endured in Pakistan, Morocco and a CIA black site.  It has also claimed that any lawsuits over Bush-era policies can simply be dismissed by invoking national security concerns.

I’m going to do something rare—agree with the NYT.  While Obama has made some notable changes in torture policy and surveillance, he has mostly given a new veneer to the old policies.  I doubt this is based on principle.  In the short history of this Administration, we’ve seen that political concerns trump everything.  The Obama Administration does not want to hand the GOP ammunition to claim they are “weak” in the WOT.

The problem with that is that they are going to get accused of weakness anyway.  Just last weak, Dick Cheney accused them of “dithering” on Afghanistan for pursuing the exact same policy Bush had.  This was a laughable accusation from an Administration that insisted everything was wonderful in Iraq until they lost the 2006 election.

In general, you can’t dictate policy by the fear that the opposing party will impugn you because they are going to impugn you anyway.  That’s the nature of politics.  The parallel I would make is to when the GOP tried to outspend and out-socialized the Democrats.  No matter how much they spent, they were still accused of “gutting” important social programs and starving grandma to death.  So what was the point of compromising their principles?

As I said last week—what are the Democrats planning to do with their power?  It seems like they’re mostly going to sit around and whine about Fox News.  I suppose that’s an improvement on their usual policies.  But there are some things that actually do need changing.  And the Bush tendency toward secrecy, executive privilege and blanket security claims is one of them.

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