SLATE: Obama promised to close Guantánamo. Why is he releasing dangerous detainees and ignoring the rest?

Obama called signing statements an “abuse” when George W. Bush used them to “advance sweeping theories of executive power,” as Charles Savage puts it in the New York Times. Now he’s using signing statements to make his own power grab. It’s another version of Obama’s disappointing switch on surveillance, from the candidate who said “no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens” to the president who says that the National Security Agency’s mass data sweeps are legal because they were presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a rubber stamp.

Presidents tend toward overreach. Congress isn’t good at pushing back. Each president who usurps more authority for his office makes it easier for the next one to do more of the same. This will be a part of Obama’s legacy that darkens over time.

But it’s Guantánamo that looms largest and blackest now.

It’s almost like he’s dangerously incompetent, and/or doesn’t have the United States’ best interests at heart. And “looms largest and blackest?” I’m sure that’s some sort of racism, implicating white women’s fears of large African-American men.