"A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand.

If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now. Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date.

Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the kidnapping and rendition of foreigners will continue, and the Bush Administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies.

Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained; when even such mock trials provide too much justice, he will make do with indefinite detention.

If, by some slim chance, a defendant were to be found not guilty, we have been assured that the president’s “post-acquittal” detention powers would then come into play. The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as “the essence
of who we are,” no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue—as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance.

In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that “the King can do no wrong,” to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute. As the attorney Glenn Greenwald has argued, in his writings for Salon and elsewhere, the rule of law has not been restored but perverted; what had been outlawed but committed, the law now simply permits. Obama’s lawyers, benefiting from Bush-era litigation, can claim conformity with law, but the disgraceful policies continue largely unchanged.

Better, smarter legal arguments obtain for policies that should give any decent man nightmares. Our torturers and war criminals and illegal spies and usurpers remain at liberty, unpunished. The wars of choice continue and threaten to spread; 30,000 additional soldiers prepare to “finish the job” in Afghanistan’s graveyard of empires while our flying robots bomb villagers in the mountains of Waziristan.

This, we are told, is progress.

Admirers of the president now embrace actions they once denounced as criminal, or rationalize and evade such questions, or attempt to explain away what cannot be excused. That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past. Even as many casual supporters begin to show their inevitable displeasure with his “job performance,” and his poll numbers decline, the character and motivations of the president remain above question. He is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing. It is not surprising that unsophisticated children, naive Europeans, and Democratic partisans continue to revere the heroic former candidate, despite everything he has done and left undone.

Nor is it surprising that the broken remnants of the old White Supremacy coalition hate and fear the man and will oppose him without quarter (excepting, of course, his war policies). Puzzling, however, is the fact that Obama, until fairly recently an obscure striver in the Chicago Democratic machine, continues to inspire perfervid devotion among intellectual liberals who know their history. Even they say: Be patient. Give him time. It’s hard to change the government. Or, more cynically: He’s the best we can do. Thus, his most sophisticated admirers assume the burden of Obama’s sins, bite their tongues, and indulge the temptation to frame his shortcomings as our own. Obama is not to blame; we are to blame. Obama has not failed us; America has failed him. Perhaps I am wrong to expect a flood of thoughtful apologetics on or around the first anniversary of Obama’s rule. It may be that the bizarre spectacle of a putatively antiwar president standing in imperial glory before an audience of young West Point cadets, declaring that War is Peace even as he promises to send many of them to the grave, will jar the liberal intelligentsia from its affectionate slumber. But, as I write, the rationalizations and hagiographies have already begun to pour in, although they are not always packaged as such."

The words of R.D. Hodge