Move ahead, but recall how we got here

1/25/09

Of course he's overhyped. Of course the expectations are too high. Of course he can't change the world overnight.

That's not what matters. President Obama has already changed this country for the better by one simple fact -- not just who he is, but who he isn't.

In 2004, there were many Democrats who couldn't make themselves overly excited about John Kerry, but still worked their hearts out for him. He lost, but not because his party didn't support him.

For many, Kerry promised the political version of the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. (The real oath doesn't say that, but the sentiment is the same.) The first thing Kerry would do, and the reason he won the support of tens of millions of people, was make George W. Bush the former president.

Obama won where Kerry lost, partly because Bush had four more years to convince everyone his party was bad news. As Obama takes office, there's a reason people talk about the challenges he faces in apocalyptic terms.

Even with all we're facing, though, the worst course of action would be to pretend we don't know how we got here. We're in this situation because the former president and his party made decisions, every day for eight years, that led to this. It wasn't incompetence to blame, though there was plenty of that. But if we decide to simply start fresh and try to forget, we'll be guaranteeing it will all happen again.

Everyone who makes that kind of suggestion, even if it's Obama himself, is wrong. If we don't have an honest reckoning about possible criminality committed by our government these past eight years and hold people responsible, nothing will change in the long term. It's not enough to say we've seen what can happen and will stop it in the future. Without consequences, there will be no deterrent.

So that means prosecuting people who broke the law by, for instance, torturing people. To say they only did it to protect their country is a fine defense, if a judge and jury want to believe it.

But it must come before a court, not be decided on some cable talk show.
Saying we need to "move forward" is demanding the questions not even be asked. The new attorney general and restaffed Justice Department can't preclude any investigations, because they don't know where the evidence will lead. If controversial cases go to trial and are decided in court, that's how it should be. But we can't pre-empt them.

Obama had most of his Cabinet approved with no fuss, but his choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, has been held up because a Texas senator wants an assurance that he won't pursue punishment against government torturers. We need to look forward, not backward.

How did we get here? A U.S. senator is telling the administration it has to rule out the idea of investigations, let alone prosecutions, when members of the recently departed administration have already admitted to torture. This isn't "24." We're supposed to be better than that.

(Incidentally, has there ever been a more harmful TV show in history? It's a fact that government interrogators have said they were inspired by the show's blatant torture, which is always presented as the only way to protect us from evil-doers, even though nearly every expert says it's not only wrong, it's counterproductive. They also have the worst writers in the business, but that's another story.)

It goes without saying that no one who was tortured in real life had been convicted of anything, or even formally charged. And torture barely scratches the surface of all the wrongs -- illegal spying, politicizing criminal investigations and all the rest -- committed in our names since 2001.

It would be nice if the election of Barack Obama was a cure-all. Just by him being in office, we're a better country than we were a month ago. But it's not enough. Unless we face these issues now, find out as best we can everything that happened and where laws were broken, we can look forward to having these same discussions the next time a Democrat is elected to clean up a Republican mess.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. He can be reached at 330-6233 or at hbailey@ctpost.com.