The Problem With The Village

David Broder scolds Obama for even possibly leaving the door open for torture prosecutions.

If ever there were a time for President Obama to trust his instincts and stick to his guns, that time is now, when he is being pressured to change his mind about closing the books on the "torture" policies of the past.

Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.

He was right to do this. But he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government. And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices.

But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more -- the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps -- or, at least, careers and reputations.

Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability -- and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.

When you have done nothing but cover politicians in Washington for 40 years, everything is political. The fact that the President as a human being may actually be bothered to want to do the right thing as millions of people outside Washington may want him to do hasn't even occurred to Broder: it is simply "populism" and populism by default should be ridiculed and dismissed in Broder's worldview. Should populism be acknowledged at all, it simply hides the crassly political. It is the ultimate Villager view: the voters aren't smart enough to know how the real world works, and the real world is Washington. Everything outside it consists of the great unwashed masses, teeming with naivete' and banal emotional responses like "accountability". Only the Villagers, especially Dean Broder here, are qualified to make Solomonic proclamations that wisely maintain the status quo and power of the Village. What the people want doesn't matter, unless it happens to be what the Village wants as well.

You could slip and break your neck on the thick pool of condescension dripping from Broder's column. How dare the rabble demand their leaders be accountable? People like David Broder made Washington, and no lesser, filthy leftists are allowed in. Obama is only as useful as he continues to see the status quo served, and that status quo consists of the Village telling Washington what to do and what to think, and Washington executing those orders, with the Village sages wisely running the country and the world. Accountability would damage the very fabric of the Villagers' power.

In other words, see Double G's Three Rules Of The Village. The GOP aren't the only enemies democracy has in our nation's capital. Not by a long shot.