Doublethink Alert: Secrecy Edition

Remember all that Bush-bashing Obama and the Democrats conducted on secrecy in wiretaps and so on?  They got a ton of mileage out of that issue during the campaign.  Of course, once the rubber met the road, Obama's tune changed:

Jake Tapper reports that the Obama administration has advanced the same position as the Bush administration on an issue of state secrets:

The Obama Administration today announced that it would keep the same position as the Bush Administration in the lawsuit Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.

The case involves five men who claim to have been victims of extraordinary rendition — including current Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, another plaintiff in jail in Egypt, one in jail in Morocco, and two now free. They sued a San Jose Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured.

A year ago the case was thrown out on the basis of national security, but today the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard the appeal, brought by the ACLU.

A source inside of the Ninth U.S. District Court tells ABC News that a representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn't changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.

Then, just a couple months later, he decided that Bush's policy actually wasn't quite secret enough:

The Bush administration got excoriated by the Left for its expansive use of the state-secrets doctrine.  Barack Obama and other Democratic presidential hopefuls pounded Bush for its use.  In fact, that was one of the principal components of Hope and Change — a shift away from secrecy and back to the "rule of law," although no one has shown how Bush actually broke any laws in the first place.  Apparently, Obama agrees, and as Jake Tapper reports, has decided to expand the Bush practice on state secrets:

Attorney General Eric Holder recently said he was reviewing the way the Bush administration used the "state secrets" argument, but "on the basis of the two, three cases that we've had to review so far — I think that the invocation of the doctrine was correct."

Huh.

That seems a little different from the Obama-Biden campaign website where "The Problem" is described in part as the Bush administration having "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court."

Because that's just what the Obama administration tried to do.

This time the issue was the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, and whether courts would be able to assess its constitutionality in a case called Jewel v. NSA, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA "dragnet."

Now, Obama has gone all out (h/t Instapundit):

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews. Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in "overcollection" of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

So, let's recap.  Bush was demonized for his eeeeeevil wiretapping policies in which he was accused of spying on Americans (that was never proven nor accurate, but the narrative stuck).  Obama got into office and decided he would actually go ahead and keep Bush's policy in place.  Then, we find out that the Obama administration has actually been 'significantly' and 'systemically' spying on Americans.

Hello?!  Where is the outrage??  Where are the calls for impeachment, accusations of dishonesty, and privacy intrusions??

[crickets chirping in the distance]

Two sets of rules, my friends.  Two sets of rules.  It's doublethink at its finest.

There's my two cents.