The GOP Is Unbelievably Full of Shit on Executive Privilege
John Cook
The Fox News wing of the Republican Party (which is to say, the Republican Party), has concluded that Barack Obama is a 21st Century Richard Nixon because he conjured a dreaded, wicked trick called executive privilege to cover up his manifest crimes. Hey, only Republicans are allowed to do that!
Background: Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee has for years been pursuing information about Operation Fast and Furious, an ATF gun-running investigation launched in November 2009 in which agents tracked guns purchased in the U.S. to see which Mexican drug cartels they were illegally smuggled to. The investigation resulted in the indictments of 20 gunrunners last January, but two of the weapons that were monitored—not supplied or purchased, just tracked—by the ATF ended up being located at the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent. Through a protracted process of negotiation going back to last March, the Department of Justice has handed over more than 7,600 pages of Fast and Furious documents to Issa's committee.
But on Wednesday, the Obama White House asserted executive privilege over a certain subset of the documents that Issa has been asking for. Not all of them, mind you: Just documents generated after February 4, 2011, when congressional investigators began their inquiry. The reason the White House says it can keep those documents—but not all the other Fast and Furious documents created between November 2009 and February 2011—secret is that they deal with "the department's response to congressional oversight and related media inquiries," an arena that involves internal executive branch deliberations that it believes are privileged.
For the record: Executive privilege is a dreadful doctrine. It is corrosive to democracy, a haven for scoundrels, an easy out for liars and cheats. It allows presidents to cover their tracks and throw up obstacles to congressional inquiry, even if a court finds it was improperly invoked months (or years) after the fact. It enshrines secrets, and secrets are bad. Obama is a hypocrite and coward for invoking it.
I'm allowed to say that because that's how I felt about Reagan's use of it to keep then-Supreme Court nominee William Rehnquist's Justice Department memos secret, and George H.W. Bush's use of it to prevent Defense Secretary Dick Cheney from handing over documents about Pentagon cost overruns, and Bill Clinton's use of it to hide his reflexive lies and monstrous appetite for intern-flesh, and George W. Bush's use of it (six all told) to cover up his various scandals. Every president since Kennedy has invoked executive privilege in one form or another. George W. Bush first did it on his 334th day in office. It took Obama 1,240.
more (refuting the GOP lies)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1002
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and others don't want to know anything contrary to their knee-jerks. Its human nature, I think. 
