Disappointed? I wish that were all I was

Okay, it's been over a year. A quarter into the presidency of Barack Obama. And I am more disappointed than I thought I'd be.

Oh, Bill Clinton made it very clear to me that I was going to be disappointed by Obama - as did the man's own style. His fairly progressive rhetoric was harnessed to the service of a centrist policy that consistently seeks "consensus" and "bipartisanship" for their own sake, not to serve any other goals. Oh, yes, he inherited a helluva mess, and oh, yes, he's handled a lot of it okay. But. His consistent refusal to push for a public option - or pretty much anything at all - in the health care debates pretty much made a mockery of his claim to want to be the last president to deal with the issue. His silence on DADT and DOMA rightly infuriates his GLBT supporters. And his escalation of the war in Afghanistan infuriates a lot of others.

But his promise to close Guantánamo within one year has not only been broken, it's been savagely shredded. As reported in the New York Times yesterday:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

Half a year ago Bob Herbert took us to task for not screaming louder about Obama's disregard for civil rights in the War On Terror. I didn't post then, because I'd made this promise to give the man a year. Well, it's been a year. And - as Herbert said - "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

To bereave a man of life... or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government. - Alexander Hamilton

This isn't just a "disappointment". This is a betrayal.

[check Glenn Greenwald's column from yesterday (Just to add some thick irony to all of this, today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama's Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year -- an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo -- indefinite detention with no charges -- will continue indefinitely.) for more on this topic.]