Wow. Yesterday, the media focused the harshest lights so far on the big campaign promises that Obama has, yet, to fulfill. Those promises were, probably unsurprisingly, about gay rights and torture.
On his blog yesterday, a truly hurt-sounding Andrew Sullivan wrote a scathing post about Obama’s failures to support gay rights and people with HIV:
I lived through eight years of the Clintons and then eight years of Bush. Through it all, gay people were treated at the federal level like embarrassments or impediments. With Clinton, we were the means to raise money. With Bush, we were the means to leverage votes by exploiting bigotry. Obama seemed in the campaign to promise something else.
. . . But I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on these issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away.
And then Dan Savage appeared on Andrea Mitchell and gave Obama an “F” for his track record on gay rights issues.
And then, in the harshest critique of the day, Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley appeared on Rachel Maddow to discuss Obama’s announcement that he would not release the 144 new torture photographs. Turley said, “It is perfectly Orwellian . . . this administration is becoming the biggest bait-and-switch in history.”
Watch the Dan Savage interview and Rachel’s Turley interview, after the jump.
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