"Discovery-Disclosure & Discussion"-Sen Whitehouse: "We Must Look Back-Too painful a cost to ignore"

[kpete]

Whitehouse: As We Look Forward We Must Also Look Back

January 21, 2009

President Obama looks to that future. Given the depth and severity of those predicaments, we need all his energy to look forward to lead us to that brighter day; forward to what Winston Churchill in Britain's dark days called those "broad and sunlit uplands."

But, as we steer toward this broad and sunlit future, what about the past? As the President looks forward and charts a new course, must someone not also look back, to take an accounting of where we are, what was done, and what must now be repaired.

.....................

If we blind ourselves to this history, if we pull an invisibility cloak over it, we will deny ourselves its lessons. Those lessons came at too painful a cost to ignore. Those lessons merit discovery, disclosure and discussion. Indeed, disclosure and discussion is the difference between a valuable lesson for the bright upward forces of our democracy, and a blueprint for darker forces to return and do it all over again.

A little bright, healthy sunshine and fresh air, so that an educated population knows what was done and how, can show where the tunnels were bored, when the truth was subordinated; what institutions were subverted; how our democracy was compromised; so this grim history is not condemned to repeat itself; so a knowing public in the clarity of day can say, "Never, never, never, again;" so we can keep that light - that light that is at once America's greatest gift and greatest strength - brightly shining. To do this, I submit, we must look back.

more:
http://whitehouse.senate.gov/newsroom/speeches/speech/?id=363e165f-3e42-4130-bb39-dbb7b765d5ee

[aquart]

1. Oh, dear, suddenly an old Shelly Berman routine is in my head.

"Forget about it. You forget about it, Sheldon. I'll forget about it. But I'll remember Sheldon. And don't you forget it."

[rudy23]

2. I wish he wouldn't support the frame that it's "looking back" while we're still dealing

with the consequences. We're still in Iraq. Still in a Depression. Still recovering from Katrina.

It's an insult to ask those of us who AREN'T in Washington D.C. to move on, when we don't have the power to.