Eric Holder Blew It as Attorney General. His Replacement Will Too. - the Week
The best thing about Eric Holder’s time as the U.S. attorney general was that he was the first one in decades to really care about civil rights. The worst thing was, well basically everything else.
Holder, who yesterday announced his resignation as attorney general, isn’t a bad synecdoche for the Obama administration. The first black attorney general, by all accounts a committed liberal with a special concern for civil rights, was also the guy who rubber-stamped the NSA’s dragnet surveillance program and the CIA’s assassination of American citizens. He prosecuted neither Bush-era torturers nor any of the thousands of high-level Wall Street fraudsters from the financial crisis (save one).
At the time, I did support the decision not to prosecute Bush administration officials for torture. I was optimistic and agreed with the idea of looking forward and not looking back. In hindsight, I was wrong.
The partisanship only increased and the media played the “both sides are equally at fault” card. If he was going to be opposed at all costs anyway, Obama should have pursued the prosecution of any member of the Bush administration involved in the torture of detainees. A large portion of the country backed the idea. It’s possible that this would have derailed the push for health care reform but there were no votes from across the aisle anyway.
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