There are good reasons why those of us who are happy that the president got re-elected because we didn’t want to see the entire federal government handed over to the Dementor Party nonetheless find many aspects of his presidency confounding, baffling, and otherwise unworthy of the powder to blow them to hell. The notion of “looking forward and not backwards” is at the top of that list. As applied to the architects of the constitutional depravities at the heart of the “war” on terror, the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA is a classic example. His confirmation hearings would be a golden opportunity for any senator who is not a sheep to look backwards publicly, as far as he can, into that particular swamp, and, no, I’m not optimistic, either.

But nowhere is the application of this principle more obvious in it moral idiocy than when it is applied to the various thieves and brigands who wrecked most of the national economy and then stole what was left, whose piracy was then rewarded by a chance to open the federal treasury hydrant and frolic in the streets. The reluctance to bring criminal cases — a lot of criminal cases, a metric ton of criminal cases — leading to punishments so severe that their greedy grandchildren would think twice about doing it again cemented in the national government the notion that the bankers were nothing more than some businessmen who’d made some terrible mistakes that were exacerbated by unprecedented circumstances, instead of the cabal of sleek crooks who gamed the country out of its wealth and then found to their surprise that the government had discovered a heretofore unknown obligation to save them from personal ruin. That reluctance was founded on the lunatic notion that these people also were responsible public citizens who would learn from what they’d done to the country and to the world.

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