Freedom Rider: Obama Pardons Bush
by BAR editor and senior
columnist Margaret Kimberley
"Obama will never investigate the Bush administration's
well documented criminal activity."
Barack Obama, like previous presidential candidates before
him, is very good at sucking up. The candidate who sucks up best to the largest
number of wealthy donors and check bundlers usually becomes the party nominee.
Obama is no exception to that rule.
The Senator would never have been able to launch a
successful presidential race if he did not already have buy-in from very rich,
very powerful people. Not only did he have to secure their support in order to
run, he must continue securing it in order to win.
That is why he will never investigate the Bush
administration's well documented criminal activity. The rule of law doesn't
apply to presidents, to their cabinet members, to members of Congress or to
criminal corporations. Obama's backers would be most unhappy if they thought
their guy was going to get into office and start calling powerful people to
account on any issue.
"Obama is a genius at double talk."
All of which means that Barack Obama will never investigate
any of the crimes committed in the Bush administration. When pressed because of
the long campaign against Hillary Clinton, Obama was sometimes forced to give
an appearance that he would actually preserve, protect and defend the
constitution if he became president. The Senator spoke
on the issue himself in April, and once again proved that he is a genius at
double talk:
"What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there [emphasis mine] and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge that because we don't have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt [emphasis mine] because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."
What kind of investigation pursues only what is already known? It seems that Obama would investigate only what he wouldn't have to look for, but not so much that Republican sensibilities would be bruised. In other words, he won't try to find wrong doing. If he did, he might have to take action and he is telling us in no uncertain terms that he has no intention of doing that:
"So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment -- I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General -- having pursued, having looked at what's out there right now [emphasis mine] -- are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it's important -- one of the things we've got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I've said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law -- and I think that's roughly how I would look at it."
Again Obama emphasizes that he would look at what we know "right now." It is also worth noting that while Obama says "nobody is above the law," he doesn't say what he would do if he actually discovered that deliberate law breaking took place. Keep in mind that this parsed statement took place when he was still in the midst of a democratic campaign when he was trying to make the case that he was the progressive candidate. After Hillary Clinton's campaign ended he no longer had any need to pretend he was progressive. The
FISA double cross
was the first signal that the end of his need to win Democratic votes meant the beginning of his take no prisoners march to the political sea.
"Obama has no intention of exposing Bush administration
crimes."
Obama took a well deserved beating from angry supporters
after he openly supported Bush and telecom industry law breaking. The brief
moment of challenge was enough to make Obama leery of speaking for himself when
he knows he is wrong. He now sends surrogates to tell us that he has no
intention of exposing Bush administration crimes.
Cass Sunstein is a friend
of Obama, a law professor at the University of Chicago and new husband of
former Obama aide Samantha Power. Lately he has been the Obama campaign
go-to-guy on the issue of Bush criminality. Sunstein's job is to tell us to
shut up and let Obama let Bush off the hook.
Sunstein is also nervous about pursuing the law breakers.
The professor thinks that only the commission of "egregious" crimes ought to be
considered for investigation. The argument can be made that any crime emanating
from the White House is egregious in and of itself. But Sunstein considers that
point of view to be overly "emotional." He thinks that outraged citizens ought
to just chill out and accept government torture, spying on citizens and lies
used to start wars. "So I guess I'm saying that
emotions play an important role in thinking about what the legal system should
be doing. But under our constitutional order, we go back and forth between the emotions and the legal requirements,
and that's a way of guaranteeing fairness. And as I say, very important to have a degree of bipartisanship with respect
to subsequent investigations [all emphasis mine]."
"Bush's crimes will be buried by a Democrat."
Even Republicans expect Democrats to maintain and perhaps
increase majorities in both houses of Congress. A Democratic president with a
Democratic congress should not have to be bipartisan about anything he wants to
pursue. The call for bipartisanship is a ruse, it is a call for doing nothing.
So Bush crimes will be buried by a Democrat. We will never
know what the government knew on September 11, 2001. We will never know the
extent of spying on American citizens. We will never know about the
manipulation of intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq, which
violated the Geneva Conventions and universally accepted international law. We
will never know what the Bush administration told Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid,
their partners in crime. We will never know anything we should know because the
system won't permit that to happen.
Margaret Kimberley's
Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York
City, and can be reached via e-Mail at
Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley maintains an edifying
and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also
available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.
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