Poetic Justice for the Bush White House

"The Moving Finger writes," said Omar Khayyam, "and, having writ, moves on..." But not according to US District Judge Henry Kennedy, who yesterday instructed White House officials to "collect and preserve all e-mails sent or received between March 2003 and October 2005."

He was responding to a suit by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Government to keep the current occupants from disposing of more than 300 million e-mail messages and 25,000 boxes of documents.

National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton points out: "In six days the Bush Executive Office of the President will be gone and without this order, their records may disappear with them. The White House will complain about the last-minute challenge, but this is a records crisis of the White House's own making."

If and when Congress appoints a special prosecutor to look into alleged criminal behavior in starting the Iraq war, outing Valerie Plame and firing the US Attorneys, among a multitude of possible crimes, the electronic and paper trail from Karl Rove et al will be critical evidence.

In that event, the Bush alumni will have to ponder the rest of Omar Khayyam's poetic wisdom: "nor all thy Piety nor Wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

It will not be the first instance of ancient voices from the Middle East coming back to haunt them.

Obama's Janus Dilemma

As he takes the oath in this aptly named month, Barack Obama is faced with looking both forward and back over an enormous list of national problems.

Steering the country through economic minefields will obviously take almost all of his administration's energies but, to the extent that present difficulties are rooted in the disastrous Bush years, the past can't be totally ignored.

In cataloguing the major frauds and deceptions, Frank Rich in the New York Times asserts, "The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal."

In his interview, George Stephanopoulos asked the President-Elect about appointing a special prosecutor to "investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping" and got an ambivalent response, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

Those who were outraged by the Bush-Cheney assault on traditional American freedoms may be disappointed by such hesitation but will have to consider the priorities of doing things right for the future against punishing the wrongs of the past.

Stephanopoulos asked about Dick Cheney's advice: "Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it."

Obama agreed but not in the way Cheney had in mind. Perhaps the best way to resolve his Janus-like dilemma is the answer Frank Rich got from Henry Waxman, Capitol Hill's "most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals."

Though Waxman "remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: 'I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.'

"He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. 'We need to depoliticize it,' he says. 'If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.'”

For Obama, that may turn out to be the best Janus-like approach.

Rooting Out Rove

A 390-page report by the Inspector General is only a small step for mankind in bringing Karl Rove to justice for what he did to the Justice Department in the firing of the nine US attorneys, but it's a start.

The internal investigation finds political pressure drove the 2006 dismissals but that refusal of major players at the White House and the department to cooperate in the year-long inquiry has left significant “gaps” in understanding what happened.

Investigators' doubts have led Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint Acting United States Attorney in Connecticut Nora Dannehy, who led the conviction of a former governor for corruption, to continue the probe and decide if anyone should be prosecuted.

The "anyone" list starts with Bush's White House toadies, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, and goes on to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was overcome with memory lapses while testifying before Congress, and his cast of ideological helpers, including Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson, who the report says "abdicated their responsibility" in supervising the firings.

After stonewalling Congress while Bush remains in office, this bunch will be facing possible prosecution in a new atmosphere next year, one in which the criminal politicizing of everything in Washington comes to an end, and Justice reverts to its original mission of discovering and punishing actual crime.

In that event, Karl Rove could be practicing his punditry for Newsweek and Fox News from a new venue that will give him plenty of time to think deep thoughts about the new American political scene.