REJECTING THE TRUE BELIEVERS

Posted at 8:34 a.m. ET

The president-elect has wisely signaled rejection of any broad inquiries into how the Bush administration pursued the war on terror.  By doing this Mr. Obama goes up against the Daily Kos and Move-On crowd, which is on the fringe left of the Democratic Party.  From The New York Times: 

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

We're still at war.  The people pushing these "inquiries" simply want to destroy our war effort, and this is the way they're doing it.  In war, horrible things happen.  But to go after people after the fact is to shatter and demoralize the very forces needed to win.  Of course, the hard left knows that.

But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.

We had one of these "purity" inquiries in the 1970s, and it almost destroyed the CIA.  Remember, there are no inquiries on the other side.

These probes are often pushed by people who say they want us to remain  "true to our ideals."  But these are the same people who'd sell out those ideals in a second.  They pushed withdrawal from Vietnam, leaving the Vietnamese and Cambodians to their fate, and never batted an eyelash.  Some ideals.

“A new president doesn’t want to look vengeful,” said a former Bush White House lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson, who was a Harvard law classmate of Mr. Obama and has represented administration figures as a private lawyer, “and the last thing a new administration wants to do is spend its time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one.

“No matter how much the Obama administration’s most extreme supporters may be screaming for blood, the president himself doesn’t seem to share that bloodlust.”

In that, the new president is acting wisely.  He might get some points from the America haters, foreign and domestic, if he went after the Bush people, but he apparently understands the damage he could do.

Sadly, the usual suspects in Congress haven't gotten the message:

The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has already introduced a measure to create a commission to investigate Mr. Bush’s detention, interrogation and rendition policies. Mr. Conyers’s bill would establish a bipartisan nine-member commission with subpoena power and a mandate “to investigate the broad range of policies” undertaken with claims that Mr. Bush’s wartime powers as commander in chief trumped laws and treaties.

Conyers is a political extremist who got to be chairman of a critical committee through longevity.  A bomb thrower in an important position.

Mr. Obama is facing even more intense pressure from liberal, human-rights and civil-liberties groups to allow some kind of investigation into the Bush administration’s terrorism policies.

I love the term "liberal, human-rights and civil liberties groups."  Yeah, right.  Consider:

Some groups are focused on prosecution. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecution efforts were justified, even if they did not lead to convictions, as a way to deter future officials from undertaking a similar “assault on the law itself.”

Translated:  We don't want any of these people to get the job done.  The Center for Constitutional Rights is a hard leftist operation, frankly a front group.  As usual, The Times whitewashes what some of these groups are really about.

The blogging army must be vigilant toward those who constantly call for thee probes.  While we clearly support the rule of law, many of these critics have other, uglier motives.  They must be exposed, or we will lose this struggle.

January 12, 2009.