By refusing to "look back", as Obama likes to call it, he has tacitly approved of some of the most egregious abuses committed by his predecessor. Absent even token prosecutions for disdainful abuses of wiretap laws by government agencies and Bush Administration officials and absent vigorous investigation and prosecution of fraud on Wall Street and the condonment and involvement, if not orchestration of this fraud by the Federal Reserve, why should anyone not expect this behavior to resume and then exceed what was done under Bush when we get the next government elected upon a "national security" platform--probably in three years. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Why indeed? It took 3 years after the prosecutions of Nixon's henchmen for Ronald Reagan to put many of them and their protegees back in business. If you relinquish power, precedents make no difference.
Why? Because they were not prosecuted hard enough, or high enough.
The precedent that was set (rather, reinforced) in the Nixon case is that current or former cabinet members will never see the inside of a prison cell.
And yes, precedents do matter.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
What the other half might have though in that event is, of course, speculation.
