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George Bush’s decision merely to eavesdrop on American citizens without oversight, or to detain without due process Americans such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, provoked years of vehement, vocal and intense complaints from Democrats and progressives. All of that was disparaged as Bush claiming the powers of a King, a vicious attack on the Constitution, a violation of Our Values, the trampling on the Rule of Law. Yet here you have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping on or detaining Americans without oversight, but ordering them killed with no oversight and no due process of any kind. And the reaction among leading Democrats and progressives is largely non-existent, which is why Olbermann’s extensive coverage of it is important. Just imagine what the reaction would have been among progressive editorial pages, liberal opinion-makers and Democratic politicians if this story had been about George Bush and Dick Cheney targeting American citizens for due-process-free and oversight-less CIA assassinations.

To be fair to Olbermann, his mystifyingly outrageous lack of outrage over this story appears contagious among the liberal MSM — so much so that it apparently forced a group of prominent liberals to fundraise in order to publish an advertisement in the New York Review of Books entitled “Crimes are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them,” which condemned Obama’s terrorist-assassination program.  Signatories to the ad include liberal stalwarts Noam Chomsky, Cindy Sheehan and Williams Ayers (though, in all fairness to Ayers, he may have more understandably self-serving motives for condemning a CIA program that summarily hunts down and assassinates suspected U.S. citizen-terrorists.)

The Obama administration on Saturday invoked the state secrets privilege which would kill a lawsuit on behalf of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an alleged terrorist said to be targeted for assassination under a U.S. government program.