Though it is a piece of superficiality worthy of People magazine, the Washington Post‘s account of the process by which Eric Holder came to make his decision to try war criminals in federal court is a remarkable–if inadvertent–revelation of just how much, despite their vastly disparate backgrounds, the attorney general resembles his coolly remote boss, the president. As his boss has chosen to do with respect to Afghanistan, so Mr. Holder solicited the opinions of a veritable army to help him “wrestle” with his responsibility:
He sought and got the nod as well from New York’s Governor Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Senator Schumer, the U.S. Marshalls Service, and Lindsey “Cap and Trade” Graham. And unlike Mr. Obama, whose stuttering impotence on Afghanistan and appeasement of dictatorships on every continent is so worryingly evocative of the dark days of the Carter presidency, the attorney general was able to pull the trigger: “The decision on trials coalesced in Holder’s mind Wednesday, at a White House principal’s meeting attended by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other top administration officials. But not until Thursday did Holder send a message to the president, then en route to Tokyo, that he had closed the thick briefing book on the cases.” As for criticism, not a worry: “I’ll just have to take my lumps, to the extent those are set in my way,” he said.
And there you have it. The dispassion, the self-reverence, the blindness of the man, are marvelous to behold, and so perfectly reflect the president he so perfectly serves. “Neutral and detached” people shall “understand the reasons why” he made those decisions, shall see he has left “the politics out of it,” and shall recognize what’s right–something the rest of us, benighted and bellicose souls that we are, have never managed to do with respect to the disposition of those committing mass murders of Americans in their ongoing war against our civilization.
