In 2001, when then Vice President Dick Cheney held closed meetings to draft an energy bill, progressives went berserk. They concocted elaborate schemes of oil executives being given the keys to U.S. energy policy, demanded Congressional hearings, considered impeachment, and filed lawsuits to demand the meetings be opened up. They preened with fetishes of democracy and transparency, insisting that they as the minority party had a transcendent moral right to be included in the deliberations over the transformation of a key area of the U.S. economy.

But now, as Democratic Congressional leaders convene to circumvent the normal conference process for the explicit purpose of excluding the minority party while considering the transformation of 20% of the entire U.S. economy, progressive bloggers and other activists are notably silent. Meanwhile, the White House is stonewalling media inquiries into President Obama’s blatant reversal of his campaign promise to open up any and all health care reform negotiations for broadcast on C-SPAN.

Can’t have the great unwashed see the sausage being made, you know, especially when it is so vitally important to blow certain things by them without them becoming aware of them, such as the proposals for cuts in Medicare payments to doctors that will result in thousands of Medicare patients being unable to find any physicians that will see them and the proposals to subject the health plans of middle class union members to confiscatory taxes that could double or triple the overall tax burden of those taxpayers. Shhh! Be wery quiet. We’re hunting wabbits!

UPDATE: Look at the reaction on Memeorandum. The silence from progressive bloggers is, as always, deafening. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.