Frank Rich’s New York Times column yesterday, headed “Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush,” was a sad symptom of America’s best and brightest still obsessing over eight years of a national nightmare to the detriment of what needs to be done now.
With an economy in shambles and the Mideast a potential nuclear tinderbox, the Obama Administration has its hands full without “a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.”
Although the Bush gang–Cheney, Rumsfeld et al–was a disaster, the American people elected them twice (originally with the help of some of the now-outraged idealists who voted for Ralph Nader), but they are gone.
The only power they have now (pace Cheney) is to control our consciousness with debates over past torture that Obama has now outlawed, with squabbles over what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, with new “revelations” that Rumsfeld was an arrogant liar.
Nobody wants to forgive and forget, particularly those of us who spent years blogging and howling about Bush abuses, but living in the past is no recipe for undoing it.