By now you’ve probably all seen this video:
ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl wrote on this video today, pointing out that back in 2008 Obama went after Bush for the very same thing he is doing now, except that since Obama is president now he has ‘a different view’:
The video is striking — and not just because Obama has absolutely no gray hair. Substitute the words “President Bush” with “President Obama” and he sounds precisely like Republicans today.
Today it is the Republicans echoing Senator Obama from 2008 who are accusing the president of violating the Constitution and grabbing power that rightfully belongs to Congress. Back then, of course, many Republicans defended President Bush for asserting executive power in the face of they called an obstructionist Congress.
None of this would have surprised Rufus Miles.
Miles was a mid-level bureaucrat in the Truman administration when one of his colleagues reluctantly left his agency to work for another. Within months of his goodbye, the official had become a turncoat: critical of his old colleagues and defensive of his new ones. Miles had predicted this would happen, telling a co-worker, “You see, it depends on where you sit, how you stand.” He eventually refined the phrase to “where you stand depends on where you sit” and it became known as Miles’ Law.
So here we have a textbook example of Miles’ Law — Barack Obama denounced the aggressive exercise of presidential power when the person exercising that power was a Republican and he was a Democrat in Congress. Now that he is the one exercising that power, he has a different view.
‘A different view’ is a very gentle way of saying Obama is a hypocrite.