I’ve been think­ing a lot about legal mat­ters recently. Now that Pres­i­dent Obama (that does sound nice, doesn’t it?) is in office, sworn in (twice, for good mea­sure) and issu­ing all kinds of exec­u­tive orders and pol­icy state­ments (whither K street? or more appro­pri­ately, wither, K street), every­one is com­ing around to the same question.

Will he seek pros­e­cu­tions of Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials (includ­ing, pos­si­bly, Dubya and Cheney) for war crimes?

We’re get­ting more rev­e­la­tions by the day, now that the old gang is out of power and less capa­ble of ret­ri­bu­tion. We’ve learned that the NSA was spy­ing on all Amer­i­can con­ver­sa­tions, all 300 mil­lion of us, on our phones, text mes­sages, email and every­thing else. The NSA was lis­ten­ing to every­thing, and flag­ging what they thought mer­ited closer exam­i­na­tion. We’ve heard Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials admit to using the “T” word, tor­ture. And even as Obama has ordered the shut­down of Guan­tanamo, we’ve all had to con­front what went on there and why so many of the detainees can’t be tried under Amer­i­can law because any evi­dence against them is inad­mis­si­ble. Attor­ney Gen­eral nom­i­nee Eric Holder said defin­i­tively in his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing that water­board­ing was tor­ture, and now Repub­li­can sen­a­tors are delay­ing the nom­i­na­tion hop­ing to get assur­ances that he didn’t really mean it, or at least won’t pros­e­cute Bush and Cheney, who have admit­ted order­ing torture.

And yet, Obama seems very care­ful to reas­sure Repub­li­cans that no one is com­ing after them. He wants to put the recrim­i­na­tions of the past behind him and move for­ward lead­ing a united Amer­i­can peo­ple. It’s a noble thought, and one I hap­pen to share with him. I’m will­ing, per­son­ally, to let the trans­gres­sions of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion go if it means heal­ing the nation and mov­ing for­ward. But is it possible?

There’s a very real chance that Obama and Holder will not have a choice. In some inter­pre­ta­tions of the law, now that Cheney has admit­ted order­ing and autho­riz­ing these tac­tics in pub­lic, Holder may be required by law to charge him. We are also bound by treaties to charge and try war crim­i­nals. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion was all too ready to ignore laws they found incon­ve­nient, but the new admin­is­tra­tion is sup­posed to be about chang­ing things, right?

Obama may find him­self in a catch-​22 even he can’t think of a way out of. He wants to unite the coun­try and end the par­ti­san divi­sive­ness that has defined Amer­i­can pol­i­tics for the last three decades. And if he charges the for­mer pres­i­dent and vice-​president (along with their sec­re­tary of state, two or three attor­neys gen­eral and a for­mer sec­re­tary of defense) with war crimes and brings them to trial, he loses all hope of ever get­ting Repub­li­cans to work with him on any­thing. It would be more polar­iz­ing than any­thing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion did. And yet, if he’s required by law to do so and chooses to ignore this legal respon­si­bil­ity, how has he changed any­thing at all?

I’ve seen lots of peo­ple on the left freak­ing out about Obama’s recent cab­i­net choices. Let’s review.

• Sec­re­tary of State: Hillary Clinton
• Sec­re­tary of Defense: Bob Gates
• Health and Human Ser­vices: Tom Daschle
• Home­land Secu­rity: Janet Napolitano
• Attor­ney Gen­eral: Eric Holder
• Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

All famil­iar names to peo­ple who remem­ber the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion. Hell, one of them is a Clin­ton. So is this change we can believe in?

Hell yes. Mal­colm Glad­well points out that it takes 10,000 hours to mas­ter any com­plex skill. Writ­ing, play­ing piano, or even run­ning a gov­ern­ment. 10,000 hours. If you work a 40-​hour work week and have two weeks off for vaca­tion, you work 2,000 hours a year. So we’re talk­ing 5 years at a reg­u­lar job before you’ve mas­tered it. I under­stand the need for fresh faces and fresh ideas, but shouldn’t some­one in the new admin­is­tra­tion already have those 10,000 hours under their belt?

Let’s take a look at each one of these choices and see if just maybe they’re not as bad as the hard core left is saying.

Sec­re­tary of State: Hillary Clinton

This is the big one that no one can shut up about, least of which the peo­ple who keep leak­ing every step of the process to the press. Bill Clin­ton has agreed to do any­thing the Obama peo­ple want to make this hap­pen, so I don’t think he’s going to be the bag­gage peo­ple thought he’d be. The big ques­tion here is whether Clin­ton can and will be a faith­ful instru­ment of Obama for­eign pol­icy, the sin­gle point on which she and Obama seri­ously dis­agreed in the primaries.

I think she will be. Every­thing we’ve seen so far shows that Clin­ton is a team player. And we also know that Obama won’t hes­i­tate to replace her if she goes off mes­sage. More impor­tantly, Clin­ton knows that being very good at this job is a great step­ping stone to the Oval Office in 2016, since Biden almost cer­tainly won’t run at age 74.

Sec­re­taries of State have to be good at two things: talk­ing to for­eign heads of state and bypass­ing for­eign heads of state by talk­ing directly to for­eign media when nec­es­sary. Clin­ton can do both, maybe bet­ter than any­one else. Obama knows this, so he’s will­ing to give her the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

Sec­re­tary of Defense: Bob Gates

We knew there would be some Repub­li­cans in Obama’s post-​partisan cab­i­net, and as we pre­pare to get out of Iraq, con­ti­nu­ity of com­mand is impor­tant. Gates knows the cur­rent state of the mil­i­tary, and can enact a with­drawal plan faster than some­one who has to be brought up to speed. Plus, Gates has already taken a stand on secur­ing our nukes by fir­ing the top mil­i­tary and civil­ian heads of the Air Force over nuclear weapon safety. I think he’ll do a good job, and will prob­a­bly be replaced once the tran­si­tion out of Iraq is well under way.

Health and Human Ser­vices: Tom Daschle

He knows health care back­wards and for­wards and he knows how to get votes on the Hill. No one is bet­ter suited to drive leg­is­la­tion on uni­ver­sal health­care, not even Teddy Kennedy. Daschle knows where enough bod­ies are buried to get votes through on this, some­thing we’ve tried 4 times in a cen­tury and haven’t done. This time it will work.

Home­land Secu­rity: Janet Napolitano

Napoli­tano has been a voice of rea­son on immi­gra­tion and bor­der secu­rity, even rid­ing horse­back along the Mex­ico bor­der and walk­ing in the sewer tun­nels ille­gals use to cross over. She’s ide­ally suited to secure our bor­ders and ports, while not piss­ing off our legit­i­mate immi­grant population.

Attor­ney Gen­eral: Eric Holder

Yes, he was Deputy AG under Clin­ton, but he’s also the best man for the job. He knows Wash­ing­ton and he has an up close look at what Ashcroft and Gon­za­les have done to break the Jus­tice Depart­ment. He can put it back together.

Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

Every admin­is­tra­tion needs a DA, a Des­ig­nated Ass­hole. A Bad Cop to Obama’s Good Cop. Rahm Emanuel was born for this job. He’s the attack dog that Dick Cheney was for Bush, but hope­fully he won’t shoot anyone.

So to wrap up, what we can tell from Obama’s picks so far is that he doesn’t care where peo­ple worked pre­vi­ously. Work­ing for Clinton’s or even Dubya’s admin­is­tra­tions isn’t a deal breaker. What he’s look­ing for is excel­lence. Peo­ple who can do the job they’re given superla­tively. In a way, it’s a very anti-​Bush pol­icy. There will be no “Brown­ies” in this admin­is­tra­tion, no one given a job for polit­i­cal rea­sons what­so­ever. Instead, we’ll have the best peo­ple pos­si­ble in each posi­tion, lead­ing with competency.

And after eight years of naked patron­age, that’s change I can believe in.

Two igno­rant crack­ers got them­selves arrested today after plan­ning to assas­si­nate Barack Obama.

Law enforce­ment agents have bro­ken up a plot by two neo-​Nazi skin­heads to assas­si­nate Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Barack Obama and shoot or decap­i­tate 88 black peo­ple, the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobacco Firearms and Explo­sives said Monday.

Assas­si­na­tion plot tar­get­ing Obama dis­rupted — Yahoo! News

Frankly, I’m sur­prised we haven’t seen more of this by now. I grew up in Texas, in a pre­dom­i­nantly black neigh­bor­hood. Seri­ously, there were three white kids in my high school, one of the larger schools in Hous­ton. Until I was ten or so, I thought I was just a really pale brother. But even so, I ran into enough big­oted red­necks to under­stand that the irra­tional roots of racism run deep in the south. It was only 40 years ago that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment had to inter­vene to guar­an­tee the right of reg­is­tra­tion and vot­ing to African Amer­i­cans (which still doesn’t work that well, see Florida 2000, Ohio 2004).

There are still a lot of igno­rant white peo­ple in the south who just can’t accept the idea of a black pres­i­dent of the United States. It is lit­er­ally alien to their entire world­view. I think one of the few things the Repub­li­can party has done right this elec­tion cycle is keep­ing these wingnuts out of the news, sweep­ing real domes­tic ter­ror­ists like the Klu Klux Klan under the rug until the elec­tion is over. But those idiots are still down there, and they’ll still be there after Novem­ber 4^th. What do we do about them then?

I’m dis­heart­ened at how many working-​class peo­ple are still out there that have been deluded into think­ing that McCain, the mul­ti­mil­lion­aire with seven house, is one of them, while Barack Obama is a “Har­vard elit­ist” who doesn’t under­stand the “real America.”:

Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., main­tained last week that, “Lib­er­als hate real Amer­i­cans that work, and accom­plish and achieve.” Such notions get trac­tion quickly in today’s age of instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Walk around Durango High School, where the crowd was wait­ing for a McCain rally to start, and peo­ple spoke glow­ingly of the Viet­nam hero’s kin­ship with “real Amer­ica.” “It’s some­thing Barack Obama can’t pos­si­bly know, because he’s not one of us. It’s like the way (Richard) Nixon was able to talk to the hard hats,” said Jim Wil­son, a dis­trict attorney.

Is Barack Obama a real Amer­i­can or a Har­vard elit­ist? | MiamiHerald.com

Actu­ally, lib­er­als work. I work. I’ve got daily wage-​slave job just like every­one else in my tax bracket. These peo­ple clearly don’t know or don’t want to know that Barack Obama was raised by middle-​class heart­land folks in Kansas, that he and his sis­ter once only got by because their mother was able to get food stamps to buy gro­ceries. That he comes from begin­nings as hum­ble as any Amer­i­can. He made it to Har­vard by work­ing for it, by get­ting schol­ar­ships. Obama’s story is the Amer­i­can dream, work­ing his way up through dili­gence and hard work, and being rewarded for his effort.

But some­thing tells me that’s not the real story here. When peo­ple opposed to Obama say “he’s not one of us,” are they really talk­ing about him being elit­ist? Because any­one who’s read about Obama for five min­utes knows that can’t pos­si­bly be true. Or is it code? When they say he’s not one of us, are they really say­ing he’s not white?

The roots of racism run deep in Amer­ica. It took a hun­dred years after the slaves were freed before they could prac­ti­cally vote, and blacks in Ohio and Florida will tell you that’s not nec­es­sar­ily even the case here in the 21^st cen­tury. In my own state of Col­orado, the sec­re­tary of state is being sued for ille­gal purg­ing of the voter rolls. I can pretty much guar­an­tee the peo­ple purged off the rolls and denied the right to vote weren’t rich white folks.

What do you think? Is the cur­rent of us-​versus-​them “real Amer­i­cans” about class, or is it really about race?

Help me out with some­thing, people.

Con­ven­tional wis­dom says that one of the rea­sons Obama is doing so well now is that the econ­omy is in the tank, and Democ­rats are gen­er­ally thought of as doing bet­ter on eco­nomic issues (remem­ber the Clin­ton years? wasn’t that great? ahh­hhh…). So nat­u­rally the topic float­ing to the top of the pun­di­toc­racy now is what could pos­si­bly hap­pen to top­ple Obama in the two weeks we have left. They need some­thing to fill up the 24-​hour news cycle now that any talk of a “horse race” causes spon­ta­neous spit takes. So peo­ple are talk­ing about an Octo­ber sur­prise, a for­eign pol­icy issue that could tilt things back to McCain. And the num­ber one item on everyone’s list is another ter­ror­ist attack.

So here’s my ques­tion. In a coun­try where we were attacked on ⁹⁄₁₁ under a Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion, by the very guy the pre­vi­ous Demo­c­ra­tic admin­is­tra­tion kept warn­ing them about, and we turned around and made the attacker stronger by pro­vid­ing mil­lions more recruits to his cause, why would a sec­ond attack make us vote for another Repub­li­can?

Sorry, but this just doesn’t make any sense to me. I know McCain’s sup­posed to be tough on for­eign pol­icy, but it’s “tough” Repub­li­can for­eign pol­icy, Bush’s “my way or the high­way” atti­tude that blinded him to Bin Laden while Bush was focused on mis­sile defense (al Qaida, at last count, had zero ICBMs, btw), that got us into this mess in the first place. Obama’s mea­sured, bal­anced and yes, nuanced approach to for­eign pol­icy, being will­ing to talk to our ene­mies and then bomb­ing them if they don’t get with the pro­gram, seems like a much bet­ter way to respond to another ter­ror­ist attack than just hav­ing McCain blith­ley reach­ing for the nuclear launch but­ton while hum­ming Beach Boys tunes.