During the George W Bush administrations, many liberals found the expansion of the security state a grave threat to Americans’ civil liberties. No longer. Since the second world war, the US civil libertarian agenda gains traction only when the Democratic Party is in opposition, as in the early 1970s. As soon as the Democrats occupy the executive branch, such concerns evaporate. Today, many Democrat-oriented intellectuals assure the public that their objection is not to government intrusiveness itself but only to such techniques being in the hands of the wrong political party — “a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush,” wrote the jurist Jonathan Turley (5). Former officials of the Bush-Cheney administration have applauded Obama’s normalisation of the post 9/11 security state. (Dick Cheney has been particularly effusive.)
-- Chase Mader, "How Obama Expanded the National Security State" (CounterPunch).