President Barack "Thin-Skinned" Obama is actually using his Justice Department to try and keep the late night hosts from getting good stuff on him:
The Obama Justice Department yesterday put forth an new legal argument, one that even the Bush team might not have had the gall to employ. Call it the Daily Show disclosure exclusion.
Yes, a Justice Department lawyer actually argued to a federal district court judge that there should be an exemption from Freedom of Information Act disclosure rules for documents that would subject senior administration officials to embarrassment -- as in on late-night television.
This is not just wrong, it's perversely wrong. By contrast, a good rule of thumb would be: The more embarrassing, the more we need to know. The Justice Department and the White House should be forced to renounce this assertion immediately.
And if this wasn't bizarre enough, consider the irony that in the case at hand, the Obama Justice Department is fighting the release of a transcript of former vice president Dick Cheney's testimony to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about his role in the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
And guess what else? The Obama team relied extensively on a legal opinion (via Emptywheel) authored by Stephen Bradbury, the utterly discredited head of the Office of Legal Counsel whose other writings included memos outrageously asserting that torture was legal -- and that Karl Rove had absolute immunity from congressional oversight.
I included that last paragraph for context so you could see that this writer is not a right-wing zealot in a blind rage about Obama, but in fact a left-wing zealot of the "Arrest Karl Rove!" and "Waterboarding is Torture!" variety, and even he's had it with Obama's tactics. It's pretty hard for Obama to get on the bad side of those guys.
Although Bush was secretive and made it clear he didn't like leaks coming from his administration, I don't remember him trying to use the force of law to keep Jay Leno from getting material for his monologue. That takes secrecy to an all new and very disturbing level.
Maybe Obama is afraid David Letterman will start leering at Sasha and Malia...
No comments:
Post a Comment