Meet the New Boss...

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald was out with another example of why he's the best political blogger on the internet. "Obama and Transparency: Judge For Yourself." It matches up Obama's promises to end Bush-era abuses with regard to government secrecy vs. the reality, wherein Obama has largely continued those policies. An article well worth a look.

It does give due consideration to the good things Obama has done in this area:

"Balanced against all of that, Obama complied with a court order directing the release of Bush-era OLC memos on torture; issued an Executive Order creating additional procedures before executive secrecy under FOIA could be asserted; and ordered his agency heads to interpret FOIA with a 'presumption' in favor of disclosure. It should also be noted that--as Think Progress documented yesterday--Obama's position in denying access to visitor logs is a direct violation of his statements about the Bush administration's practices in doing the same, and the same is true for his use of the Bush-era version of the state secrets theory."

The record is pretty bad, and, as Greenwald notes, this only deals with the matter of government transparency:

"...it's worth emphasizing that the above excerpts pertain only to transparency issues. None of this has anything to do with what The New York Times in May--referring to Obama's Bush-replicating policies on detention, rendition, denial of habeas rights, military commission and the like--described as 'how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office.' No matter how you look at it, this is quite a record."

As the song says, "Meet the new boss..."

--classicliberal2