God forbid that Obama should undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency. From Greenwald today regarding Charlie Savage's NYT article about Obama's continuing Bush ideas about executive privilege:
That may be the most revealing quote of the article. If–as virtually all Bush critics agree–the Bush presidency ushered in a massive and dangerous expansion of executive power, isn't it necessary, by definition, to scale back some of those powers– i.e., to "undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency"–if those abuses are to be reversed? The cynical view has long been that Obama will not, on his own, meaningfully uproot Bush's executive power expansions because political officials do not get into office and then start voluntarily giving up their own power. Craig's statement constitutes a virtual affirmation of the cynic's view of Obama's intentions.
Not Good. We'll see how this plays out–we should expect his lawyers think in the narrowly expedient, visionless, turf-conscious way that bureuacrats think, but we need to hear it from Obama before getting really bent out of shape on this. This better be an issue a reporter confronts him about in his next presser. The worst-case scenario for America is that the Bush authoritarian infrastructure, aka
"executive privilege," remain intact long enough for the Republicans to get back into power again. Obama may or not abuse his executive powers, but we can be sure someone in the future will.
UPDATE: Sullivan gets it:
It may be that there are just unavoidable costs to Bush's legacy, and revealing the full extent of those crimes could undermine security or alliances in ways no government responsible for security in a flawed and fallen world can allow. At the same time, there's a very thin line between having no choice but to inherit this stinking pile and retroactively becoming complicit in it. I worry increasingly about the latter.
There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing. If you are president of the United States, the advocates for doing the wrong thing are legion, and their arguments hard to resist especially when only three weeks into the job.
Leave a Reply