Obaminet: The Upcoming Eric Holder Fight

Brian Beutler, on the statements from the Republican Party that they will try to block Eric Holder's nomination:

It looks like the Republicans threw every name on Obama's roster of cabinet designates into a hat and drew Eric Holder. And so, he'll be the guy they try to block.

I do think that blocking Eric Holder is crass and etc. But I don't think it's random. See, one of the very early questions that will face the Obama Administration is how to treat the crimes committed by the former Bush Administration. President Bush did not deliver any pardons, which means that an incoming Attorney General would be well within his rights to appoint a Special Prosecutor or in general open an investigation into, say, torture (along the Levin-McCain Report lines).

How can the Republicans in Congress possibly fight this? If they try to make a tough fight over Eric Holder, try and paint him as a partisan -- maybe leveraging his involvement in the Clinton Administration pardons -- they can then slander any attempt to bring President Bush or cabinet to justice as a partisan assault. They're hoping that they'll force Obama into the position of losing his mantle of bipartisanship, or forgetting any attempt to discipline the Bush administration.

On The Subject Of Fear

Watch this video. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Beutler spend a fantastic hour using Brian Beutler's experience being shot to talk about fear.

The fear they speak of is in multiple veins: the fear of a community outsider (whether racially outside or economically outside) as well as the fear of a member of a broken community. I can't possibly recap the conversation, but the bottom line is that we talk about the fear of the outsider, and at the same time, that same fear is hidden within that community, under the surface.

And as it pertains to gangs, it is fascinating to talk about the fear up until the age of about 15 that Coates describes, of young folks who don't know yet know how to integrate into their community. Up until high school, we have the chance to offer them a different way, and that fear is what we have to address. That's the core of the issue. The fear of those who live in a broken community.

And of course, on that drum I will continue to beat, I think this is a fantastic example of the conversation we need to be having in this country; a Charlie-Rose style conversation, where the goal is to understand and not to convince. This is also the conversation that President Barack Hussein Obama called for, way back when we were upset about Reverend Wright.

UPDATE: The moment after I hit that "publish" button I finished rereading my last post about this "conversation" and saw the words:

"More, America. We need more discussion."

I'd just like to say that in this important discussion about race, it needs to be held together. One man banging off a post about race and then another person banging off another post about race is not what we need. We need two (or more) people in a room, confronting themselves with each other.