…same as the old boss. Or damn-near it.

Prepare yourself for another vigorous round of the Obama administration pretending to do Something Big while doing virtually nothing at all, this time concerning the CIA’s despicable “interrogation” techniques. But first, here’s a little roll call of what Barack Obama has accomplished since ascending to the highest office in the land back in January. Be warned. It ain’t pretty:

1) The hideous power of America’s banking system has been reconfigured so that the banks, which Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner helped bail out to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, can get back to the important business of hammering people in every conceivable manner and posting quarterly profits in the billions of dollars. Did I mention that Geithner was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and did more than his fair share to put us in the crapper in the first place? That would appear to be why he sat there like a numbnuts with his finger up his ass while AIG handed ridiculous bonuses to its self-serving loser executives after we bailed them out.

2) Speaking of ridiculous bonuses, the ones being raked in by Wall Street hotshots have been - to hear the White House tell it - battened down considerably…to the point that Wall Street hot shots are still raking in ridiculous bonuses and nobody gives a shit.

3) The credit card industry has been retooled so that the card companies can continue screwing you raw through insane interest rates and obscure fees. But now they have to tell you exactly how you’re going to get screwed, directly to your face, as opposed to through tiny, incomprehensible jargon at the bottom of your monthly statement.

4) The military's absurd "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which Obama promised during his presidential campaign to eradicate with a flick of his supple wrist, still stands. Because he decided not to do anything about it.

5) Health care is now going to be being fixed. Except that Obama is compromising himself into oblivion while attempting to do so. You see, crazy, ill-informed (dare I say “illiterate”) people think Obama is Hitler or Goebbels or Gengis Khan or Snidely Whiplash or Beezelbub for wanting to give them a shot at affordable medical coverage. So he’s decided to abandon the possibility of their getting any real help, all while making it look like he’s still hard on the case.

6) The “Cash for Clunkers” program worked. Until it ran out of money. But it did work. Until it ran out of money. And now there’s word that the government is dragging its feet in reimbursing the car dealers who were handing out all that dough for gas-guzzling used cars. So maybe it didn’t work.

7) And, finally, a bill was signed shortly after Obama entered office ending the U.S. Government’s ability to randomly torture people in the hope that the detainee would scream out information that could stave off “9-11 Part II,” i.e. the only stupid, violent sequel the American public seems wholly uninterested in sitting through. When he signed the bill, Obama gravely intoned that “the United States does not torture,” and, silly me, I believed him. Since then, though, he’s reserved the right to keep sending indefinitely-held prisoners to torture friendly foreign countries, just like Bush did. And it looks like the very people who turned these types of interrogations into official U.S. policy are about to get a free pass while the administration performs a piece of theater in which it pretends to clean up the piss, shit, and blood generated by our government’s inhumanity.

I’ll get back to that, though, because I voted for Obama so he could point this country in a demonstrably moral direction once again, not to watch him feign commitment, then punt the most basic of all American responsibilities— the upholding of human rights for all people, not just the ones we want to give them to.

                                                ***

To say the least, Obama’s time behind the wheel isn’t turning out as advertised. However, most of my fellow liberals still seem prepared to ignore the mounting evidence that Obama either has testicles the size of Bayer aspirins or that we’ve been straight-up played for fools.

The best I can tell is people are letting him slide because he’s handsome, well-read, eloquent, funny, and those charcoal gray suits hang well on his frame. In that sense he’s a vast improvement over George W. Bush. I’d be fine having dinner with Obama, as long as we didn’t talk policy, whereas I’d probably fork Bush in the Adam’s apple if he so much as started discussing the infield fly rule. But in other ways…well…let me think about it.

Okay, I’ve thought about it. So far, Obama’s hardly any fucking improvement at all.