It did not even take a full week for President Obama to begin going against some of the strongest positions he ran on during Campaign '08.
Already President Obama has violated two of the positions of Candidate Obama that were cornerstones of his platform - his criticism of post-9/11 domestic spying and his pledge that would restrict former lobbyists from working within government agencies. Both 180s coming on Thursday, which was only his 2nd full day on the job.
While the media has given a good bit of attention to his nomination of William J. Lynn to Deputy Defense Secretary [3], it's puzzling that they have all but ignored the Obama administration's filing in a San Francisco federal court [4] to admit key evidence in a case in which the Bush policy of warrentless eavesdropping came into play, reiterating a Bush administration filing to the court [5] made late in the evening on Monday - one of the very last acts of the Bush presidency.
More from Wired.com [4]:
The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor. With just hours left in office, President George W. Bush late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to stay enforcement of an important Jan. 5 ruling admitting key evidence into the case.
Thursday's filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless-eavesdropping program. The former president approved the wiretaps in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"The Government's position remains that this case should be stayed," the Obama administration wrote (.pdf) in a filing that for the first time made clear the new president was on board with the Bush administration's reasoning in this case.
Amazing what having access now to daily briefings on national security can do for one's core values, I guess.
Again.. What is puzzling to me is that the liberal mainstream media has chosen to totally ignore this action by President Obama. It would seem that this would be the one of the two flip-flops they would have pounced on... I mean, even Liberals have lobbyists that work on behalf of their causes. Forbidding former lobbyists from having positions of power within federal government, particularly one in which it is the Democrats who are in power to place these people into the positions that would benefit them the most, just doesn't seem like the red meat issue that the media would be more concerned about here.
Perhaps, they're giving him a pass on the issue that they are sure would cause Obama a lot more 'static' with the base in exchange for creating all of this buzz around the issue that the left is less concerned about... their former advocates and voices who have been working on behalf of the issues they believe in being brought into employment within Obama's administration. There's only room for one criticism per day of our new president within one 24 hour news cycle, apparently.
The whole idea that there should be restrictions on employment by the federal government of someone who has previously been in a position in which they had total understanding and familiarity on any given issue or field, to the point that they were actually advocates on behalf of that issue or area, is a prime example of why Washington is in trouble to the degree it is today.
But, sure... this is the focus of the media's outrage on this day. Mmmm Hmmm!
