Obama has, unfortunately, surrounded himself with Clintonites.  While some think this is a positive situation, many progressives (who have been spot on about the Bush regime and its Democratic enablers) are concerned, and with justification.

 

If  former Clinton administration minions are like the following dolt, who offers terrible, wrong advice, we're in for some serious problems.

 

From Glenn Greenwald: "A Washington Post article today on the need to restore confidence in the Justice Department quotes former high-level Clinton DOJ official Robert Litt urging the new Obama administration to avoid any investigations or prosecutions of Bush lawbreaking:

Obama will have to do a careful balancing act. At a conference in Washington this week, former department criminal division chief Robert S. Litt asked that the new administration avoid fighting old battles that could be perceived as vindictive, such as seeking to prosecute government officials involved in decisions about interrogation and the gathering of domestic intelligence. Human rights groups have called for such investigations, as has House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.).

"It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries," Litt said. "It would really spend a lot of the bipartisan capital Obama managed to build up."

"There is a coherent way to argue against investigations and prosecutions of actions by Bush officials:  one could argue that they weren't illegal.  Obviously, if one believes that, then that is conclusive on the question. 

"But that's not what Litt is arguing here.  Instead, his belief is that Bush officials should be protected from DOJ proceedings even if they committed crimes.  And his reason for that is as petty and vapid as it is corrupt:  namely, it is more important to have post-partisan harmony in our political class than it is to hold Presidents and other high officials accountable when they break the law.

"This brazen defense of lawlessness articulated by Litt is now as close to a unanimous, bipartisan consensus across the political establishment as it gets.  This is what has been advocated by everyone from David Broder to top Obama adviser Cass Sunstein.  There are few things more difficult than finding someone of prominence in the establishment that disagrees with this view.  Our political class has decided that high political officials -- particularly the President and those closest to him -- are literally exempt from the rule of law.  

"In today's New York Times, Charlie Savage identifies the self-serving motive leading new Presidents to continuously uphold this lawbreaking license for their predecessors:

Because every president eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash investigations into their predecessor's tenure.Mr. Bush used executive privilege for the first time in 2001, to block a subpoena by Congressional Republicans investigating the Clinton administration.

"In other words, by letting criminal bygones be bygones within the Executive branch (Ford's pardon of Nixon, the Iran-contra crimes, and now Bush lawbreaking), Presidents maintain their gentleman's agreement that they are free to commit crimes in office -- break our laws -- with total impunity. 

"Nobody believes that "policy differences" should be criminalized.  That's a strawman -- an obfuscating term -- erected by those who are defending presidential lawbreaking license without having the intellectual honesty to admit they're doing that.  This is about having laws in place that clearly and explicitly say that "X shall be a felony," only to then watch as the President does X, and thereafter have our political establishment announce that it's more important to avoid partisan anger than it is to hold high political officials accountable under the rule of law.  

"Here, X = "eavesdropping on Americans with no warrants," and "torturing detainees," and "destroying evidence relating to investigations," and "interfering in criminal prosecutions for political purposes."  Those are crimes -- felonies -- in every sense of the word, not policy differences.  And they are all actions in which Bush officials have clearly engaged. 

"But our political establishment venerates "centrism" and "bi-partisanship" as the highest religious concepts.  Those terms are, in reality, nothing more than vehicles to insulate government officials and the political establishment generally from any accountability.  Their only real meaning is that cooperation within the political establishment is paramount, regardless of political principles and the rule of law.  Hence, investigations and especially prosecutions are scorned as terribly divisive and partisan, even when they involve crimes; good "non-partisans" and "centrists" eschew such unpleasantries, by definition.  

"In his 1776 revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, Thomas Paine famously declared that "so far as we approve of monarchy, the law is King."  But the Robert Litts and Cass Sunsteins and David Broders have radically re-written that principle so that, now, "trans-partisan harmony is King," which means, in turn, that the President -- whose crimes should no longer be prosecuted due to fear of sowing "divisiveness" -- resides above the rule of law, and thus possesses one of the defining traits of a King.  

"As political scientists have documented, one hallmark of tin-pot tyrannies is the belief that political leaders should be liberated from the constraints of law as long as that helps to achieve good results.  That's the defining mentality of those who crave benevolent tyrants  -- our Leaders have so many Good and Important Things to do for us that they can't be distracted and weighed down by abstract luxuries like upholding the rule of law.  That's now clearly the prevailing consensus of our political establishment."