Hold former Bush administration officials accountable for their misdeeds?

Why, it’s just crazy enough… it might work!

The whole idea seemed to be off the table until this week when Obama unexpectedly fobbed it off on his straight-shootin’ Attorney General, Eric Holder on Tuesday.

Before this week, I would have bet that this issue was going to go the way of the Nixon pardon: Let the bastards off the hook for the perceived good of the country. I even bought it, a little bit. In some short-term ways, it would be advantageous to have the whole ugly sordid mess just go away. We elected Obama so we wouldn’t have to read, hear or blog about any of those feckless fucks again. I was ready to let go of my anger, same as it seems like Obama was.

And there’s an argument to be made that chasing ourselves around with carving knives might tend to make us look foolish in the eyes of the world community, especially the no-monkey-business regimes we’re currently in pissing matches with.

But I guess the domestic polls were tracking the other way and like any reasonable politician, Obama followed their lead. What I love about how he did it is he first and foremost kept his hands clean by ruling it out of his purview, and then he threw it to his crazed junkyard dog of an AG, Mr. Holder. That was as good as Don Corleone telling Luca Brasi, “Make ’im an offer he can’t refuse.”

And upon reflection, I think the country is not only strong enough to withstand the prosecution of criminal acts by former federal officials and appointees, but I think it will make it stronger. Holder’s recent overturning of reviled Republican senator Ted Stevens’ conviction suggests any investigations he launches will not the devolve into the partisan witch-hunts of the Clinton-era investigations. And I think it will be a damned good precedent to set, as good as Ford’s pardon of Nixon was a bad one.

Not that I take issue with Ford’s pardoning of Nixon. At the time, it was almost certainly the right thing to do. We were reeling from both Watergate and Viet Nam and we didn’t need ‘our long national nightmare’ to continue on ad infinitum. We needed closure then, and Nixon’s pardon gave it to us.

We don’t need closure now. We’re not reeling; on the contrary, we’re in the throes of hope and looking forward to some change we can believe in, in spite of the financial morass we’re in. Now is the time to take a stand on our morals and send the message to the world that where justice is concerned, America walks it like our Constitution talks it.

And if the Left gets a little jolt of schadenfreude every time some former official gets tossed in jail for contempt when they refuse to testify, it seems a small price to pay. They could put a webcam in Cheney’s cell, offer it on pay-per-view and retire the national debt in the former VP’s first year. A month if they put him in genpop, a week if he goes to Gitmo. I’d definitely buy that for a dinar!