..out of the dark

To avoid the dangers of an unchecked executive, we we must assertively question Obama about what he's doing, why he's doing it and how he's doing it. We should insist on answers to our questions. And we should aggressively examine those assertions that strikes us as dubious. Indeed, Obama's audacious promises -- and all the hope he has inspired -- entitle us to hold him up to a higher standard than we ever held Bush to.


But we also have a chance to raise the level of discourse, which suffered badly over the past eight years. Because the Bush White House was so opaque, we became overly accustomed to superficiality and trivia in our discussions of the presidency. Obama's promise of transparency means we may actually have more substantial things to talk about. Faced with no evidence of a serious Bush policymaking apparatus, we put little effort into genuinely debating policy options. But by contrast,(...)