A Malignant Outrage

A couple of weeks back, Michael Goldfarb had this to say about the Democratic-left's outrage at Joe Lieberman's continuing tenure as the chair of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee:

The Democratic party and the left won a stunning victory in this election, and while they should be savoring it (and most are) a few are busy trying to settle old scores. It’s pathetic, but it’s also cause for some optimism: these people are a cancer on the Democratic party that even a landslide victory couldn't cure.

The anger hasn't gone away, of course. Leftists are still resigning themselves to Barack Obama's shift to the political center. But Dibgy at Hullabaloo is braying tonight about the decreasing likelihood of war crimes prosecutions for Bush administration officials next year:

I have always been in favor of prosecutions for the unitary executive torture regime. Recently, however, I have reluctantly concluded that the best we could hope for is a "9/12" Commission investigation since Obama has been making it quite clear that he doesn't intend to pursue government officials through the Justice system (and congress is congenitally incapable of it.) I was impressed by Charles Homan's article in Washington Monthly that at the very least we needed to establish some official narrative of illegality and abuse of power lest this become an established option for future presidents ....

[Discussion of Dahlia Lithwick ] ....

I have been being overly "pragmatic" (depressed is more like it) in assuming that a 9/12 commission will be better than nothing. It would actually be worse than nothing, creating a shallow self-serving narrative of fine, hard working public servants who may have strayed over the line from time to time because they were only trying to keep us safe. It's always been out there ....

This movement conservative zombie was created at the time of Nixon and his pardon, extended through Iran Contra, went through the insane era of partisan investigations in the 1990s which culminated in a trumped-up, partisan impeachment, a stolen election and the lawbreaking Bush years. Nobody has ever paid a price for any of that.

This really is a psychology of vengeance. President Lyndon Johnson's adminstration is widely considered to a have launched the contemporary "imperial presidency," and the dramatic enhancement of executive power in the 1960s grew with American intervention in Vietnam and later developed into a subterranean gray zone of that fed right into the Watergate-era abuses.

Digby conveniently ignores that equally significant era.

Indeed, her essay illustrates Goldfarb's point perfectly: If this is not the kind of maligancy that Goldfarb's talking about, I don't know what is.