Slouching towards a 4th term (cont.)*

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Deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Bush administration, John Yoo, talks about civil liberties during the Obama administration.





From the Daily Caller:

The Obama administration’s use of executive power has gone further than the Bush administration’s toward diminishing Americans’ civil liberties, author John Yoo told The Daily Caller.


“Somehow the Obama administration has increased the protections for terrorists, while at the same time reducing them for the rest of us law-abiding citizens in the United States,”

Yoo said after a panel discussion on his new book “Taming Globalization” at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Yoo was deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Bush administration. During his tenure, he authored what came to be derided as the “torture memos,” which defined what techniques were acceptable to use during interrogations of terrorist suspects.

Anti-war organizations branded him and many others in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself, as “war criminals.”

Yoo said the anti-war movement has not criticized President Barack Obama, despite his administration’s formalization of a process for “targeted killing[s]” of American citizens without trial.

“You don’t see the same critics who so thrashed President Bush, for allegedly thinking he was a king, making the same arguments and engaging in the same criticism of President Obama,” Yoo told TheDC.

“I think a reasonable person can only conclude that is because President Obama happens to be a Democrat, where as President Bush was a Republican.”

(italics, ours)



Think about this for a moment: the current administration still desires to see alleged terrorists we have penned-up down in Gitmo tried in U.S. civilian courts yet the President signed into law just this past year granting the federal government the power to indefinetely detain U.S. citizens here on American soil without cause and kill U.S. citizens overseas without traditionally recognized due process.

The hypocritical left in this country obviously does not see a problem with that. So much for the righteous wailing and gnashing of teeth we saw from 2003 right up until January 2011.





In other totally related news:

Actress and left-wing activist Susan Sarandon has claimed she was recently denied security clearance for a visit to the White House - and that the government has been tapping her phone.

The Oscar winner, who has vehemently condemned the war in Iraq, made the claims on Sunday during a Q&A session at the Tribeca Film Festival - an 11-day event in New York's Lower Manhattan.

One audience member asked whether Sarandon, who was answering questions alongside documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, believed she was under surveillance by the government.

'We know we're under surveillance,' Sarandon said: 'I’ve had my phone tapped.'
She added: 'I was denied a security clearance to go to the White House and I don’t know why.' She asked the audience member jokingly: 'Do you know why?'

Frankly, we care not a wit that this loopy broad was denied access to the White House and we're curious as to why this should matter to her. What we are curious about and what we would love to ask this person who marched in anti-war protests during the Bush administration: where's the outrage, now, sweetheart?

One year ago, we were just over a month into our overseas kinetic military adventure in Libya to prevent wartime atrocities protect civilians take out military targets assassinate a foreign leader without Congressional authorization and where were you? Where were you?


Ah, to have the moral pliability of an early 21st century American liberal.

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* We feel we are doing a terrible disservice to the first two terms but the title of this series illustrates a convenient and truthful trend line.