Obama Lost a Little Lustre?

In case you forgot what America will be gaining when Bush is leaving:

As it turned out, the power of the president soared to new heights under Bush. Many of the administration’s most aggressive moves came in the realm of national security and the war on terror in particular. The Bush administration claimed the authority to deny captured combatants — U.S. citizens and aliens alike — such basic due-process rights as access to a lawyer. It created a detention facility on Guantánamo Bay that it declared was outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts and built a new legal system — without any input from Congress — to try enemy combatants. And it argued that the president’s commander-in-chief powers gave him the authority to violate America’s laws and treaties, including the Geneva Conventions.

What an absolute human, economic, constitutional and democratic disaster. 

A fair number of American Muslims are suddenly pouring forth hot and cold on Obama's views on the Middle East and how he doesn't promise change because he sticks to a range of positions and personalities over there.  Because, apparently, the only important change, never mind realistic possibility for change, is for Obama to ignore 97% of Americans and instead to enforce alignment with a minority American community's agenda, a community that has little clout, weight or financial resource (in organized form); and/or to ally with a set of countries that are generally on the verge of falling apart, failing or stalling. 

Let's put it this way: We booted out the Republicans, Americans all of us, because we want, and need, to fix America.  Our country.  We need change on health care, the economy, taxes, energy and infrastructure, education and the great conversations of race, identity, citizenship and gender.  Our specific, community-based foreign and domestic policy concerns won't be heard till we as a community are deserving of an audience, unfortunately or not, and when the failure to provide that audience results in electoral discomfort.  Full stop.  That doesn't mean in the meanwhile we forget about all the other things we can achieve, and the good thing that the end of Bush's presidency will be.