January 16, 2009
NYT Op-Ed
Forgive and Forget?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.
At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.
The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.
Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.
There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?
Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?
One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?
Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?
In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.
Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.
Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.
[emphasis added]
And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make. [emphasis added]
Axé, Paul Krugman, and axé, Ned Sublette, who has brought my attention to this piece. Axé to the Obama aide who finds this post and brings the Krugman’s piece once again to Barack’s serious attention.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Here’s another recommendation of Sublette’s, from the Wall Street Journal. I fully endorse the following:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189731669479777.html
Obama Should Act Like He Won
By THOMAS FRANK
As we anxiously await the debut of the Obama administration, we hear more and more about the incoming president’s “post-partisan” instincts. He has filled his cabinet with relics of the centrist Clinton years. He has engaged the evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his
inauguration. And according to Politico, he wants 80 Senate votes for his stimulus plan — a goal that would mean winning a majority among Republicans as well as Democrats.
Maybe these will turn out to be wise moves. Maybe they won’t.
Audacity they ain’t, though. There is no branch of American political expression more trite, more smug, more hollow than centrism.
After all, as Mark Leibovich pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times, transcending faction has been the filler-talk of inaugural addresses going back at least to Zachary Taylor’s in 1849. When you hear it today — bemoaning as it always does “the extremes of both parties” or “the divisive
politics of the past” — it is virtually a foolproof indicator that you are in the presence of a well-funded, much-televised Beltway hack.
Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very
particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants.
And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are “New Democrats,” “Radical Centrists,” clear-eyed believers in a “Third Way.” The red-hot tepids, we might call them — the jellybeans of steel.
The reason centrism finds an enthusiastic audience in Washington, I think, is because it appeals naturally to the Beltway journalistic mindset, with its professional prohibition against coming down solidly on one side or the other of any question. Splitting the difference is a way of life in this cynical town. To hear politicians insist that it is also the way of the statesman, I suspect, gives journalists a secret thrill.
Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he — and the vast silent middle for which he stands — knows beyond question what is to be done.
Here, for example, is centrist Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, writing last October on the debate then raging over the role of deregulation in precipitating the financial crisis: “So blaming deregulation for the financial mess is misguided. But it is dangerous, too, because one of the big challenges for the next president will be to defend markets against the inevitable backlash that follows this crisis.”
Got that? Criticizing deregulation is not merely wrong but “dangerous,” virtually impermissible, since it problematizes the politics that everyone
knows president 44 will ultimately embrace.
As this should remind us, the real-world function of Beltway centrism has not been to wage high-minded war against “both extremes” but to fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of liberalism. Centrism’s institutional triumphs have been won mainly if not entirely
within the Democratic Party. Its greatest exponent, President Bill Clinton, persistently used his own movement as a foil in his great game of
triangulation.
And centrism’s achievements? Well, there’s Nafta, which proved Democrats could stand up to labor. There’s the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
There’s the Iraq war resolution, approved by numerous Democrats in brave defiance of their party’s left. Triumphs all.
Histories of conservatism’s rise, on the other hand, often emphasize that movement’s adherence to principle regardless of changing public attitudes. Conservatives pressed laissez-faire through good times and bad, soldiering on even in years when suggesting that America was a “center-right nation” would have made one an instant laughingstock.
And what happens when a strong-minded movement encounters a politician who acts as though the truth always lies halfway between his own followers and the other side? The dolorous annals of Clinton suggest an answer, in
particular the chapters on Government Shutdown and Impeachment.
That’s why it is so obviously preferable to be part of the movement that doesn’t compromise easily than to depend on the one that has developed a
cult of the almighty center. Even a conservative as ham-handed as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay seems to understand this.
As he recounted in his 2007 memoirs, Republicans under his leadership learned “to start every policy initiative from as far to the political right as we could.” The effect was to “move the center farther to the right,” drawing the triangulating Clinton along with it.
President-elect Obama can learn something from Mr. DeLay’s confession: Centrism is a chump’s game. Democrats have massive majorities these days not because they waffle hither and yon but because their historic principles have been vindicated by events. This is their moment. Let the other side do the triangulating.
Write to thomas@wsj.com.
axe, indeed.