When President Barack Obama met with human rights activists a few days ago, he put a chill in the room by floating what sounded like a suspiciously Cheney-esque idea.

According to the mortified activists who slipped details of their off-the-record meeting to The New York Times, Mr. Obama is mulling a way to bring the legally dubious concept of "preventive detention" into conformity with American law.

Arguing that future presidents -- himself included -- should have the power to hold terror suspects indefinitely without charging them, Mr. Obama said that he was brooding about how to deal with future terror suspects and not those currently held at Guantanamo Bay.

You can't help but wonder why Mr. Obama would even bother making a distinction between those who haven't been tried after seven years under Mr. Bush and those who will linger in the legal limbo he's currently weaving from the strands of his former idealism.

President Obama's notion of preventive detention is yet another crazy and extralegal boondoggle straight out of the Bush-Cheney playbook. When it was an arcane theory of Bush Justice Department hacks, it was denounced by civil libertarians, politicians and legal scholars of all persuasions. Once upon a time, a certain presidential candidate named Barack Obama explicitly condemned it, too.

Yesterday in a televised speech at the National Archives, Mr. Obama returned to the lofty rhetoric that helped get him elected. Citing his administration's rejection of torture and the necessity of closing Gitmo, Mr. Obama said all the things that would have mollified his base 100 days ago.

Alas, there is skepticism among civil libertarians alarmed by the Obama administration's retreat from the best practices of a democracy in recent weeks. Mr. Obama's flip-flop on releasing Iraqi prison abuse photographs and his unwillingness to support a congressional truth commission are seen as capitulations to Bush era logic -- because they are. Mr. Obama doesn't have as much faith as he should that our nearly 300-year-old Republic can handle the truth. It is the worst kind of liberal paternalism.

Meanwhile, when conservative pundits praise the president for reversing course, it says something about the convergence of once diametrically opposed views of civil liberties and terrorism. Even as the Republican Party implodes and public support for the GOP evaporates, the president's foes haven't changed as much as he has.

As usual, Barack Obama's speech yesterday sounded eloquent and high-minded compared with Dick Cheney's, which followed minutes later. The former vice president is, indeed, the "fear monger" that Mr. Obama made a veiled reference to, but the actual distance between them is eroding quickly.

I'm not suggesting that Mr. Obama doesn't have convictions, but his willingness to embrace positions by his critics -- most of whom have been exposed as frauds many times over -- is disheartening.

After the election, the chasm between Democrats and Republicans was as wide as the gap between early Homo sapiens and Australopithecus. If Obama and the Democrats aren't careful, we'll be back in the days of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons fighting in close quarters for supremacy again.

It will be interesting to see how President Obama deals with the arrest Wednesday of the four geniuses suspected of plotting to bomb a New York synagogue. They also wanted to bring down military planes with stinger missiles.

Without minimizing the danger they represented, they remind me of the quartet of Muslim extremists who plotted -- ineptly -- to blow up fuel lines and gas tanks at JFK airport a few years ago. The Bush administration portrayed them as terrorist masterminds when they were far from that.

Thank goodness our homegrown terrorists are so cash-strapped. They would be really dangerous otherwise.

Contrary to what many of my critics assume, I'm glad the ACORN canvassers who falsified names on voting lists here were busted.

Those activists, who insist they were just filling quotas to keep their jobs, are as much a threat to democracy as defective voting machines. Voter disenfranchisement is evil whenever practiced by the left or the right.

Only 21 percent of those registered to vote in Allegheny County turned out for Tuesday's primary election. What does that say about our commitment to democracy?