House of Eratosthenes

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS TO FACE PROSECUTION
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At the White House, Press Secretary Adam Brickley said that President Sarah Palin stands firmly behind the decision. “It’s not as if we relish the thought of prosecuting members of the previous administration,” Brickley said, “but, at this point, there is a clearly established precedent – set in place by the Obama Administration themselves – which says that government officials must be held accountable if they contributed in any way to major breaches of the law. In this case, the individuals under investigation do appear to have purposefully allowed these terrorists to continue their actions – prioritizing international public opinion over the lives of the American people. So, while this may be a politically charged issue, there is a real need to prosecute.”

Best of the Web, yesterday, spelled this out as nothing less than a constitutional crisis — and, toward that end, made an unexpectedly strong case:

If officials pay for policy mistakes not only by losing elections but by losing their freedom, that would amount to a fundamental change in America’s form of government. As The Wall Street Journal notes in an editorial:

At least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

What Obama is offhandedly contemplating, then, amounts to a step toward authoritarian government. The impulse behind the push to prosecute is an authoritarian one as well. Matthew Yglesias of the left-liberal Center for American Progress writes that “large-scale punishment for the perpetrators of Bush-era war crimes is less important than establishing some form of political consensus that torture is wrong for the future.”

Yglesias blames this lack of “consensus” on “the existence of a large and powerful conservative media apparatus,” including the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and he quotes approvingly from a blogger called Neil Sinhababu:

I don’t think that we’re going to be able to establish any such consensus anytime soon. It used to be that we were worried about Fox News defeating us in elections, or beating the drums for another Bush Administration war. Winning by big margins is nice, because we don’t have to worry about those particular horrors for at least a little while. But now we have to worry about how Fox and the rest of the right-wing noise machine are going to continually sustain a substantial minority of crazy people, preventing the formation of an anti-torture consensus, an anti-war-of-aggression consensus, and anti-warrantless-spying consensus. Even if there’s majority support for these views, anybody scrapping for power within the Republican Party will find reason to oppose them, just to get a majority of Republicans.

I think the impossibility of consensus on these issues is part of why nobody thinks about consensus and there’s so much left-wing attention to judicial punishments for the perpetrators.

What troubles Yglesias and Sinhababu, then, is the existence of disagreement and debate–the essence of democracy. They seem to imply that prosecution is a method by which to force the consensus they would like to see. But a forced consensus is no consensus at all. If those now in power yield to the temptation to use authoritarian means–however well-intentioned their ends may be–they will set a precedent that their opponents, perhaps equally well-intentioned, may one day use against them.

To be sure, most of what we have written is speculative. Perhaps we will make it through the Obama years without being attacked, so that the dire consequences we imagine will never materialize. Perhaps, too, the current frenzy will blow over and will prove to have been only a distraction. But the president’s noncommittal words have fueled the Angry Left’s demands for recriminations.

It may be that the president can put out this fire only through bold and irreversible action–to wit, by issuing a blanket pardon of former officials and intelligence agents for their actions in the war on terror.

Obama, on this issue, is the perfect illustration of the hazards involved in confusing mediocrity with excellence, especially when investing power in candidates who are ideologically strangers to us. He looks — or at least, looked last year — like a walking triumph of order and reason over weirdness and chaos. But the theory that Obama is the triumph of order over chaos, is based entirely on the premise that a sensible Captain’s hand is upon the tiller of the ship-of-state. Whatever decision He makes about this issue, or that one, is bound to be sensible. This has to be the case. The dude talks kinda like Walter Cronkite, how can it not be true?

But nobody really knows what He’s going to decide. We don’t even know if, behind closed doors, the decision really belongs to Attorney General Eric Holder, as President Obama has said out in the open.

Our walking triumph of over-over-chaos, on this issue if on none other, is a loose cannon. We’re literally waiting to see if we still live in a representative democracy, or a banana republic. And it comes down to the itches one or two guys have between their ears.

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Should President Palin Bring the Obama Administration Up on Charges?Friday, April 24th, 2009

Should President Palin Bring the Obama Administration Up on Charges?
Friday, April 24th, 2009