In many of the classic Western cowboy movies the theme is the town taken over by the bad guys.

The bad guys are usually cattlemen or ranchers, scheming to own everything and exempt themselves from the law. Often they hire the town marshal and he helps them break the law.

Then Clint Eastwood rides into town, alone, and goes about re-establishing law and order without “special” circumstances for the rich and the powerful. It is never easy, for the corrupt justify their power and fight to retain it.

But, in the end, the good guy wins and brings back law and order.

Barack Obama rode into town this week and has lost little time bringing back law and order. In this case the bad guys were the Bush administration and their smirking disdain for our laws.

They started out by deciding that government was secret from the people. Dick Cheney showed us that with his Secret Energy Task Force.

President Bush showed us that with his instructions to federal agencies to resist Freedom of Information Act requests, as long as the agencies thought they were acting legally. The president showed us that again by claiming to “lose” millions of White House e-mails required to be maintained as public records. They remain missing today.

But the bad guys did more than just ignore the law. They actually mocked it. When they needed a legal basis to torture they simply avoided anyone in the federal system that would argue and made David Addington, VP Cheney’s legal advisor, and John Yoo, a mid-level justice Dept attorney, their “go to” guys.

Addington and Yoo, with the help and support of the Presidents’ personal attorney, Antonio Gonzalez, re-defined the powers of the presidency in Nixonian terms: “If the President does it, it is not illegal.”

Still not convinced that they had mocked our laws and constitution enough they used the NSA and our telecommunications media to violate the FISA Court rules established in 1978, claiming those rules were “obsolete.”

Then, seeing a Democratic Congress on the horizon in 2006, they immunized everyone involved from prosecution.

But disdain became personal animus when Joe Wilson had the nerve to tell the nation in an Op Ed that the administration lied about Iraq seeking nuclear yellow cake. Our President denied any White House involvement in “outing” Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative and promised to fire anyone who was involved.

As it turns out Dick Cheney was involved and Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to protect Cheney. No one was fired, Libby resigned, and Rove and Arie Fletcher, who also exposed Plame, were left in their positions.

But this week the law rode back into town and signed an executive order to close the illegal Gitmo, and put an end to the policies of torture and rendition by this great nation.

The law re-invented the concept of open government and it appears as Whitehouse.gov, where details of presidential actions are updated daily…the antithesis of secret government.

There remains more to be accomplished. The new attorney general has yet to be confirmed. If confirmed, Eric Holder must dismantle the “law by political affiliation” that came to represent the Bush administration. Just as Leon Panetta must end all rendition and torture conducted by our CIA, and decide whether to subject those who broke our laws to justice.

But these things will happen, because the law is back in town. And this is an important part of the celebration in Washington — 1.8 million people showed up to see the new sheriff come to town.

Jim Crawford is a contributing columnist for The Tribune and a former educator at Ohio University Southern.