In his first couple of weeks as president, Barack Obama has issued some good executive orders and signed some good legislation. But it was bound to happen sooner or later—we always knew he would eventually start to compromise his principles.

And here we go: According to the L.A. Times, President Obama has signed an executive order that preserves his authority to employ the reprehensible practice of “extraordinary rendition.”

In other words, despite all of his lofty rhetoric about closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and shuttering the CIA’s “black sites,” President Obama apparently agrees with the Bush administration’s policy of abducting U.S. citizens or foreign nationals from their homes or off any street in any city anywhere in the world and “rendering” them to a foreign location or authority for detention and questioning.

Is this the change I’m supposed to believe in? I’m supposed to make excuses for why it’s okay for the president to assert the right to kidnap people and possibly hand them over to regimes that use torture? Sorry, no can do. I wanted to believe Barack Obama was telling the truth in his inaugural address when he said, “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Excuse me, Mister President, but I wasn’t aware that our ideals condoned kidnapping.

You’ll need to do better than this if you want to make us believe you stand for more than putting a new face on the same old evils.