I concur with Glenn Greenwald when he says that the Obama administration’s recent assertions of Bush-era state secrets claims are wrong and indefensible:

Every defining attribute of Bush’s radical secrecy powers — every one — is found [in the the Obama DOJ's response to a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the Bush administration for its illegal wiretapping program], and in exactly the same tone and with the exact same mindset. Thus: how the U.S. government eavesdrops on its citizens is too secret to allow a court to determine its legality. We must just blindly accept the claims from the President’s DNI that we will all be endangered if we allow courts to determine the legality of the President’s actions. Even confirming or denying already publicly known facts — such as the involvement of the telecoms and the massive data-mining programs — would be too damaging to national security. Why? Because the DNI says so. It is not merely specific documents, but entire lawsuits, that must be dismissed in advance as soon as the privilege is asserted because “its very subject matter would inherently risk or require the disclosure of state secrets.”

What’s being asserted here by the Obama DOJ is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face. It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior.

It’s quite interesting to note that Keith Olbermann laid into Obama with both barrels on this topic on his show last night:

With all that in mind, I also agree with Greenwald’s reaction to Olbermann’s commentary:

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, an intense Obama supporter, 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.

I watched the above Olbermann segment last night. During the show, I repeatedly kept thinking to myself, “There is no way in hell O’Reilly or Limbaugh or any other the other right-wing bloviators would be laying into Bush for any of his transgressions in the way that Olbermann is doing right now”.

This speaks volumes about the need to always keep our rational faculties about us and not just accept as gospel what our political leaders are telling us. This is just as true when the President’s name is Obama as when his name is Bush.