Village idiots like Stu Rothenberg have great difficulty understanding President Obama because they only hear what they want to hear. Obama says he wants to ‘look forward and not back’ when it comes to the Bush administration, and Rothenberg thinks Obama has lost control when it turns out that the Attorney General and Congress might not be looking forward. But Obama also said that ‘no one is above the law’ and that ‘waterboarding is torture’. He also said that the Department of Justice has to make independent legal determinations.
When you hear two seemingly contradictory sets of statements, maybe they aren’t contradictory at all. Maybe you can figure out what is meant by looking at what is actually being done. Obama doesn’t want to talk about the Bush administration’s crimes, but he says that they committed them. Maybe he calls their crimes ‘mistakes’ but he doesn’t tell his Attorney General to treat them that way. After all, a refusal to prosecute torture creates international jurisdiction. It is not possible to sweep this under the rug. That’s another thing that Rothenberg simply doesn’t understand. Look at how he describes accountability:
The president made it clear initially that he wanted to avoid looking “backward” at the previous administration’s policies, reiterating that view on Thursday at a meeting with Congressional leaders.
But for a couple of days, and in the face of a firestorm of protest from his party’s ideological left, Obama backed off from that position, seemingly handing the issue off to Congress, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democrats are far more inclined to rake Bush administration officials over the coals in the Congressional version of a show trial, and, quite possibly, to go even further.
Notice that he defines accountability as a ‘raking over of the coals’ and ‘a show trial.’ Check this next part out:
But in the case of Bush interrogation tactics, deferring to Congressional Democrats and to the party’s political left only drew Obama back into the very fray he was trying to avoid and put at risk his agenda for the next year and a half.
Obama actually was deferring to the law, which makes it the responsibility of the Attorney General (not the president) to determine if crimes were committed and what to do about it if they were. He was also deferring to the separation of powers which gives Congress the independence to provide oversight and make autonomous decisions about what to investigate and what to ignore. He might want to concentrate on his agenda, but facts are stubborn things. Obama is acting like the reluctant warrior precisely because he doesn’t want to put his agenda at risk, but he isn’t pretending that he has the authority to wipe history’s slate clean.
You can see how uninterested Rothenberg is in the crimes of the Bush administration and the reputation of this country.
There are many compelling reasons to avoid a “truth commission” or Congressional show trial, but purely from a political point of view, a full-scale witch hunt into alleged Bush administration abuses, including the possibility of prosecution of some, is nothing short of nuts.
Nuts!!
First, a truth commission such as the one called for by Pelosi and others would soon become the only story, making it all but impossible for Obama to accomplish his policy agenda. If you are looking for something comparable, think Monica Lewinsky plus the Clinton impeachment, and you’ll start to get a sense about the train wreck we’d be heading for.
The Republicans could defend torture as vigorously as the Democrats defended blow jobs but, somehow, I don’t think that they will. Insofar as they do, their brand will be tarnished ever further than it has been already. By 2011, the Democrats will have well over sixty seats in the Senate, as Rothenberg knows better than most. How, then, will Obama’s agenda be sidetracked? The point of a Commission, after all, would be to have a final triumph over the torture-apologists, reducing the dead-enders to a condition reminiscent of the last of the segregationists. How could that possibly be bad for the nation or the Democrats?
Second, Democrats already are divided over how to handle the matter. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) wants to go much more slowly on investigating Bush interrogation procedures, and you can be sure that there are plenty of Democrats from the South and from rural areas who think that a partisan Democratic show trial of Bush officials would amount to something close to political suicide.
I think Rotherberg fails to understand how history will treat the torture-apoligists. He’s probably right that there are plenty of rural and Southern Democrats that would rather not have a Commission, but political expediency is not the way to deal with war crimes. This next part really gets me.
Don’t Pelosi, Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and others on the left remember what happened to Republicans when they tried to take their pound of flesh from President Bill Clinton?
Here, again, we have a Village Idiot equating lying about fellatio with ordering the savage treatment of human beings in our custody. And…what happened to the Republicans when they went after Bill Clinton? Oh yes, I forgot, they chipped away enough at the Democrats’ credibility to sneak George W. Bush into the White House on a promise to ‘restore honor and dignity to the office’.
Third, Democratic efforts to publicly destroy former Bush officials surely would run counter to the mood that Obama has tried to create since his election.
Notice how Rothenberg frames this as an effort to ‘destroy Bush officials’. It is as if there are no public interests involved here and any accountability or justice is driven by mere vindictiveness. But the object is to redeem our reputation in the world and avoid a situation where former high officials in our government are indicted for war crimes in foreign courts because we abdicated our treaty responsibilities. Keep that in mind when you consider this next objection.
Fourth, Democrats could find along the way that there isn’t a bright line of responsibility, and some of them could end up being implicated. Democratic leaders were briefed about the interrogation tactics and failed to complain loudly, complicating the issue and making party leaders appear hypocritical.
Rothenberg thinks the Democrats should back off in order to cover their own asses!! That’s a remarkable moral judgment, don’t you think? It’d be one thing to predict that they will make that decision out of a misguided self-interest, but to recommend that course as the correct one really demonstrates a twisted sense of propriety that is probably only possible inside the Beltway.
And if a misguided self-interest doesn’t convince the Democrats to back off, maybe polling data will do it.
Finally, ABC News polling director Gary Langer’s April 23 column, “Obama, Cheney and the Politics of Torture,” points out that the public’s reaction to what Langer calls “types of coercion” and even to “torture” under certain circumstances is complicated. Democrats could unintentionally hand their political opponents an opportunity to paint them as insufficiently committed to take steps to prevent another terrorist attack.
If doing the right thing under the law is political dangerous, it shouldn’t be done. That’s Rothenberg’s assessment. But Rothenberg doesn’t respect the law.
Recently, spokesman [Robert] Gibbs said that it is up to the Justice Department, not the White House, to determine how to proceed on the matter of those who formulated and carried out Bush administration interrogation policy — passing the buck.
It’s not passing the buck. It’s an abuse of office to tell your Attorney General to prosecute or not prosecute for political reasons. Rothenberg is criticizing Obama for not abusing his office in the way that Bush and Alberto Gonzales abused theirs.
Sometimes, even presidents who don’t want to make enemies need to draw a line, take control of a situation and tell their party loyalists not to cross it, if only for their own sake. Hopefully, the president has learned that lesson.
If Obama wants to grant clemency, he can do so after the fact. It might even be appropriate. But the law requires that those that order torture are prosecuted. To fail to do so for political reasons would be morally wrong.
