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It's simple, Mr. Greenwald, you know that.
The powerful do not give up their power. The presidency has become immensely powerful, more so, I should think, than the designers of our government could even possibly conceive. No man, or woman, is going to step into the Oval Office and give up any of that power, no matter how odious its application might be.
It's Obama's bad luck that his predecessor's use of the new, improved presidential powers involved such blatantly un-American (and anti-American) incidents such as the Abu Ghraib abuse, but then nobody said wielding power would be easy on the conscience.
One can only fantasize, of course, about the president issuing fiats that, oh, I don't know, repeal DOMA, void the blanket amnesty granted to telecom companies that violated their customer's privacy rights, or...gosh, having a real doozy here...holding Congress responsible for letting the executive branch get so obscenely powerful in the first place.
