I have my first guest-post up at Upturned Earth, and it re-explores a lot of the ground I covered in my "Myth of the Moderate" post. The inspiration for the post is the way in which the Administration-to-be has been less than encouraging on the very issues upon which so many relatively prominent libertarians, conservatives, and disaffected Republicans found Obama appealing.
The post is pretty well summed-up with this 'graph:
Now, in the case of scuttling investigations into potentially criminal abuses by the Bush Administration, it would again be bad politics. Why? Far from being a precious waste of “bipartisan capital,” it is these very potential abuses that, more than anything, led Republicans and disaffected former Republicans to vote for Obama. I am, after all, quite certain that Republicans and disaffected former Republicans who voted for Obama did not do so because they favored his health care plan or his support of the bailout, to name a few. Instead, they voted for Obama over fundamental issues of executive power and excessive war-making. To thus
talk about risking “bipartisan political capital” by investigating Bush-era abuses of power is to ignore the base upon which Obama received whatever “bipartisan political capital” he obtained in the first place.
Please read the whole thing here. And, while you're at it, add Upturned Earth to your RSS feeds.
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