Obama has said nothing about Bush's "dismantling of the Bill of Rights"

Nat Hentoff:

"The present Democratic Congressional leadership—Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi—has shown no interest at all in bringing back the Constitution. Would President Barack Obama take charge and lead the way back to what James Madison and Thomas Jefferson gave us? As the 1787 Constitutional Convention was ending, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a new citizen what it had created: "A republic," said Franklin. "If you can keep it."

Throughout this campaign, Obama has said nothing about CIA secret prisons and rendition, Bush's wiretapping and e-mail scrutiny of us (which Obama voted to support), or other dismantling of the Bill of Rights.

When Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate, I had great hopes that the Delaware senator would indeed awaken the citizenry. Throughout his failed campaign for the presidency, Biden continually riffed on his 2007 bill—the National Security and Justice Act—that would "Prohibit CIA 'extraordinary renditions,' close 'black sites' . . . [and] prohibit torture and mistreatment of detainees in U.S. custody." Bush, Biden emphasized, "has undermined the basic civil liberties of American citizens. The terrorists win when we abandon our civil liberties."

But as of this writing, the putative vice president has become silent on all of this, fulfilling his assignment as an attack dog tracking McCain and Sarah Palin."

However obvious his writing may be at times, Hentoff has an understanding of the secular principles of the US Constitution, and an understanding of the bipartisan police state (remember it's your right: Don't F-ing Vote (DFV)).