I confess that the Bush administration’s brazen brazen criminality even has me beaten down. I have simply gotten used to them breaking the law. However, President Obama is going to have to decide how much of this criminality to prosecute. He can’t possibly prosecute it all. His Justice Department will have to pick and choose. Some investigations are already ongoing (Sen. Ted Stevens, for example), while others are stuck in various Inspector Generals’ offices.
If elected, Obama is going to come into office with a message of unity and transcending partisan bickering. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it will be difficult to maintain that line if the Justice Department is aggressively investigating that last administration and continuing the Abramoff investigations.
So, my question is: what are the really crucial crimes that absolutely need to be prosecuted? What standard should we use? I know it’s tempting to say that Bush should be thrown in the Hague, but there is a limit to how far we can go. Obama is not going to come into office and start indicting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, etc. So, what is reasonable to expect?
