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 gullible Americans, who take things at face value, still believe their new president represents a real change, a challenge to the status quo, while the more sophisticated Europeans are quick to pick up on Obama’s inconsistencies – made all the more glaring by his habit of pairing two mutually contradictory stances on the same issue.

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President Barack Obama invoked "state secrets" to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.

And reinvent themselves they indeed have attempted to do, though their aims and rhetoric have the same old familiar warmongering ring about them as they had during the Bush years. The recently launched and far less grand-sounding Foreign Policy Initiative headed up by arch-neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan, has taken a different tack from the old PNAC. In there Mission Statement for the new FPI the neocons renew their old animosities toward those they considered past threats.

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