Keith Olbermann's Scathing Criticism of Obama's Secrecy/Immunity Claims

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, of all people, 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 (and promoting the Olbermann clips). 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.

This
is quite encouraging but should not be surprising. As much as anything
else, what fueled the extreme hostility towards the Bush/Cheney
administration were their imperious and radical efforts to place
themselves behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and above and beyond
the rule of law. It would require a virtually pathological level of
tribal loyalty and monumental intellectual dishonesty not to object
just as vehemently as we watch the Obama DOJ repeatedly invoke these
very same theories and, in this instance, actually invent a new one
that not even the Bush administration espoused.

To be
clear: there are important areas in which Obama has been quite
commendable, and I've personally praised him fairly lavishly for those
actions (see, for instance, here, here and here),
but it is simply unacceptable -- no matter what else is true about him
-- for Obama to claim for himself the very legal immunity and secrecy
powers which characterized and enabled the worst excesses of Bush
lawlessness. Yet in a short period of time, he has taken one step after the next to do exactly that.

The
Olbermann segments, which are really worth watching, highlight the
exact passages of the Obama DOJ's brief which I excerpted and posted on
Monday, and underscore how intolerable the Obama administration's
conduct in the area of transparency and civil liberties has
increasingly become. Credit to Olbermann for highlighting this issue
and commenting on it with such unrestrained candor. This should help
galvanize greater action to make clear to the Obama administration that
this conduct is completely unacceptable, and -- with Accountability
Now, FDL and others -- I expect there to be some specific actions
announced very shortly to begin pushing back, hard, against these
serious transgressions:

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See also: this post, posted immediately prior to this current one, on drug policy debates.