President Barack Obama’s recent campus visit, following his highly touted State of the Union address, has elicited a predictable upsurge of sycophantic praise for the president. A recent viewpoint written on behalf of the University’s chapter of the College Democrats stressed how “honored” we all should feel for his brief 30-minute campaign speech. However, praise for Obama seems to be based more on the fact that he’s less insane than the Republican frontrunners and members of Congress rather than on his actual record of accomplishments. A critical examination of Obama’s major domestic initiatives and foreign policy actions reveals not only significant discontinuities, but even exacerbation of some of the most egregious policies established by the Bush administration.

It didn’t take long after Election Day 2008 for Obama to show what kind of “change” he so proudly proclaimed during his campaign. Almost immediately upon assuming office, the Obama administration gave Bush administration officials full immunity from criminal prosecution for what every major human rights group, the United Nations and multiple army general investigators have termed war crimes. Instead of focusing on war criminals, Obama has vigorously prosecuted whistleblowers who’ve exposed government waste and crimes at a higher rate than all other previous administrations combined. Daniel Ellsberg, the highly respected journalist who leaked the Pentagon Papers, stated that Obama was worse than Bush and Nixon on such issues. Obama’s hypocritical excusal of the Bush administration’s crimes, with the ostensible desire to “look forward” while at the same time prosecuting the heroic whistleblower Thomas Drake for exposing the fraud and illegality of the previous administration’s National Security Agency, is simply inexcusable. All of this is coming from a president who campaigned specifically on transparency and rule of law and a strong critique of the Bush administration’s lawlessness.

Just in the past month, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. The Act gives the U.S. government the right to indefinitely detain nearly anyone, including American citizens, without charge or trial. This has been bitterly condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union and many other civil liberties organizations for its blatant unconstitutionality and violation of international law. While Obama has asserted that his administration will choose to interpret the new provision in a way that does not allow detention of American citizens, this has no bearing whatsoever on how a President Mitt Romney might choose to interpret the law. The ability to indefinitely detain citizens without charge or trial has been the hallmark of authoritarian governments and is a violation of our constitutional and human rights.

Another Bush initiative that Obama has vastly expanded is the use of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The media typically presents a sanitized picture of these strikes against “militants” that dehumanizes the victims of U.S. bombing while only briefly mentioning the cold and calculating collateral damage. So far, the number of children killed by drone strikes authorized by Obama has reached nearly 200. In fact, of the 2,000 people killed in these strikes, very few have even been identified. This has made it difficult to assess who exactly is being killed and what justification there is for killing them. The utter lack of oversight and accountability involved in these operations has caused Human Rights Watch to call for an end to drone operations until the Obama administration can show they were lawful and didn’t disproportionately kill civilians. The administration has refused to honor the ACLU’s Freedom of Information requests regarding the drone attacks, allowing the administration to continue killing whomever it pleases at will while keeping victims invisible and as far from the public mind as possible. If we were forced to look into the faces of the innocent who have been so recklessly killed by U.S. bombing before seeing Obama’s speech on campus, perhaps we might feel more outraged than honored by his presence.

While it’s understandable that most college students are concerned with Obama’s education policy and what he’ll do for Michigan, it’s important to remember what most of us claim to believe about human rights. If we, as a student body, have a minimal level of moral integrity, we should be willing to stand against the numerous well-documented ongoing human rights violations committed by the Obama administration. While I haven’t mentioned even a fraction of this administration’s abuses here, these examples speak strongly to this administrations disregard for the rule of law and human rights. It’s time for liberals to stop ignoring these issues and acting as though the only criticisms of the president must come from conservatives.