Pres. Xerox

Extraordinary rendition. Guantanamo. Warrantless wiretapping. State-secrets privilege. Military commissions. Indefinite detention without trial. For a president who promised heaping helpings of change, Barack Obama seems remarkably devoted to carrying forward the policies of his predecessor.

Comes now word that the administration has signified in favor of extending three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act: the power to access business records, to track "lone wolf" terrorists, and to conduct roving wiretaps. (The first of those provisions is the one that authorizes Uncle Sam to find out what books you've been checking out of the local library.)

There's a case to be made for extending those provisions, of course: They're necessary to head off another 9/11. They might be precisely the measures that have -- as conservatives say the Bush administration has done -- "kept us safe" in the years since. Indeed, the fact that a staunch liberal has adopted the policies he criticized so vigorously on the campaign trail lends credence to that notion. On the other hand, because of the secretive nature of anti-terrorism operations, claims that various government powers have stopped madmen from committing mass murder are hard to verify and must be taken on faith.

That debate is orthogonal to the point here: Given the extent to which Obama's wholesale review of Bush-era national security policies has turned into wholesale recapitulation of them, perhaps Obama will go down in history as President Cut-and-Paste.