Forgive and Forget? - Krugman

[groovedaddy]

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16krugman.html?th&emc=th

[saracat]

1. This is a brilliant and powerful piece! I hope our President listens

to Mr. Krugman who has always been the voice of reason. Thank you Paul.

[DCKit]

2. We've been saying the same things for years...

why has the MSM waited so long to get with the program?

Granted, Krugman has been a vocal critic, but, after reading and posting to DU for a few years, all these forensic articles dissecting the illegalities of the maladministration are just deja-vu all over again.

[MarcMus]

3. A Dream

I hope beyond hope that anything will be done to at least acknowledge the work the Bush administration did to break down American politics, but sadly, one of their biggest pushes was in the expansion of executive power. So, if Obama doesn't want to do it, it probably won't happen.