Obama is a hypocritical liar who will do or say anything to get elected.

Check to see if their lips are moving.

Obama has always been a centrist Democrat, and except for a few head-pats to The Left, he campaigned as such. He positioned himself to the right of Hillary Clinton on a few issues, FFS.

Through the campaign and up until now, I have no idea who Obama represents. He has no obvious base to support his policies, aside from Broder and co. I vastly underestimated the power of willful self-delusion amongst "progressives." They'll do anything to squander the chances they have of implementing the policies they claim to support.

I agree with Mr. Pierce. Barack Obama has shown great courage in his life, up to and winning the Presidency, but now that he is there, he is capitulating to the established forces (big business and their allies in the Repug and Democratic parties, the military neanderthal leaders, and the Beltway pundits). Having won the Presidency, he now appears afraid of losing it.

President Obama needs to remember that the great majority of the country is with him.

Seriously, all of this calls into question the health of our democratic republic. Since the inauguration, Obama has been bending over backwards to prove to the CIA that he's 'on their side.' Why is the CIA a more important constituency then the people that elected him? Why do their concerns trump our laws? Where is the constitutional or legal basis for an agency of the federal government to wield such unrestrained power? Is the power even in the hands of the president anymore? Is this still a government of rules and laws, or a gang of thugs seizing power by masquerading as our servants and protectors?

John Kennedy promised 'to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds'. He didn't live to do that.

Obama has always been a centrist Democrat, and except for a few head-pats to The Left, he campaigned as such. He positioned himself to the right of Hillary Clinton on a few issues, FFS.

That isn't the issue. The issue is specific beliefs he claimed to have in these areas and the vast disparity between those claimed beliefs then and his actions now.

Where you thought he fit on the political spectrum (left-right-centrist) has nothing to do with that critique.

NATIONAL SECURITY!

We wouldn't want to look like monsters to the rest of the world now, would we?

IT'S SPRINGTIME

FOR OBAMA

AND AMERICA . . .

Obama is amassing power for himself. Imagine if we had a Congress that told him, No. Imagine that his supporters told him, No. Support shouldn't be a blank check for wrongdoing (which is occuring in the financial realm and with healthcare as well).

I believe Obama gave clear indications before his election that he would grab power for himself. His FISA vote was probably the strongest indicator of his real intentios, but there were others. Be that as it may we must learn from cheneybushco. I hear many people say, oh, he's only been in office for a little bit. My answer to that is, so what? Cheney managed to engineer himself into office in very little time at all. He plotted the PATRIOT act in a short period. He and Addington planned Gitmo on 9/11. A lot can happen in a very short time. It isn't the time period that matters, it's the actions being taken in that time period. It's also not the person who makes an action just or unjust. Obama is a cult of personality to many. This must change and change quickly.

Obama is a cult of personality to many. This must change and change quickly.

Indeed. The thing I found most disturbing during the Bush presidency -- mostly in the first five-six years -- was the intense, blind loyalty of Bush followers to whatever he decreed. Even Bill Kristol acknowledged that "Bush became the cause."

But on the Right, the allegiance to Bush wasn't that personalized. The allegiance was really to the movement -- the right-wing movement -- and Bush just happened to be the leader of it. That loyalty was easily transferable to whoever else would have taken his place.

Not so with Obama. Many of his followers view him as a singular figure. The allegiance is very much to Obama himself. Just as is true for many conservatives, there are plenty of people who voted for and support Obama to whom this doesn't apply, but there is a clearly a large contingent who are deeply loyal to Obama the man, to his personality and persona. They feel affection and even love for him that is typical of how the public reacts to, say, their favorite celebrities, though it's far more intense with Obama because of the belief that he's a unique agent of transcendence, transformation and a personalized type of salvation.

There's obviously no reasoning with that. One just has to work around it, and hope that it will dissipate over time.

Absolutely right. The only thing that would be worse than Obama having taken these recent positions would be for these recent positions to "accepted". If these recent abominations "make it through the news cycle", there is even greater risk that they remain.

It's beyond "chess", it's beyond "yeah, but Obama is good and will use these powers for good, not evil". Maybe Obama is a bad guy and wants to whitewash Bush's evil; maybe he's "hoping" to get "reversed" -- either way, and any variation in between, if these things are allowed to pass unnoticed or are perceived to be OK not only with the right wing but with the nation as a whole, there will be no correction.

Thanks Glenn. Keep at this full bore. What's happening is wrong, immoral, and is not keeping us safe, either.

I think you are being, here and elsewhere, rather too nice about the British and their government. There is a very interesting piece by Gareth Peirce in the latest London Review of Books about 'Torture, Secrecy & the British State', in which a brief history of British torturing is given, and in which British complicity in American torture is made very clear. But whether much will come out and be publicly discussed, and whether there will be any accounting, is very doubtful, since Britain is a far more secretive state than the USA.