Just take a look that new, opaque government we’ve been governed by the last half dozen years or so, and counting…

Bush Admin: What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Us, 2007 Version (Via Josh Marshall/TalkingPointsMemo.com.)

This is an effort to compile all the programs cancelled/classifications added and so on over the past year or so.

While the title is deliberately paranoid, I think we all realize that there will be changes to programs, to the classifications of programs and so on. That’s a given. And we (taxpayers) won’t always be given a reason for these changes, and we’ll often think something is fishy where it really isn’t

But still.

Take a look at the list, the volume of such, and the strangeness of some – closing EPA libraries for budgetary reasons, when a recent study showed these programs produced a surplus of funds, for example. Can’t have it both ways.

Just doesn’t pass the smell test.

And when you lump them all together, well, paging George Orwell…The Ministry of Truth is alive and well.

And when President Bush – and others in the administration – talk about bringing democracy to Iraq and the rest of the tinderbox that is the Mideast, is this the type of democracy they envision? One of disdain for judicial oversight, for classification of potentially embarrassing/damaging reports, for a more imperial presidency?

Or the one of our founders, based on the lively exchange of dissenting view, of checks and balances, of “advise and consent”?