Maddow: Why compromise with GOP 'in hilarious disarray'? David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Tuesday November 25, 2008





Print This Email This With a mandate from the voters, Barack Obama would appear to have an open field to put through his own agenda without worrying about the opposition. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, however, is concerned that Obama is too set on finding consensus to take a hard stand on an issue as contentious as war crimes.



"Why is the President-elect with strong majorities in Congress and the Republican party in utter, hilarious disarray, acting already like he has to fear and accommodate the Republicans in order to get anything done?" Maddow wondered on Monday. "While Obama has repeated his stand to close the prison at Guantanamo and reassert American laws against torture, Newsweek and Salon.com both report that now he may not push for prosecutions of Bush officials."



"Are you seeing too much kumbaya here?" Maddow asked her guest, Slate editor Dahlia Lithwick. "He seem to be making good on the let's-all-come-together part of his message, but it seems like he's the one doing the compromising without much call for it."



Lithwick agreed, noting that "I've been waiting to hear war crime tribunals really get sexy," but instead, "we're hearing an awful lot coming out of the campaign that's saying, 'Oh, we want to turn the page, we don't want to look bloodthirsty and ruthless.'"



"If you don't want to expend capital on war crimes, what do you want to expend it on?" Lithwick asked.



"Don't you sort of need prosecutions in order to draw a bright line under these things as American policy?" Maddow suggested. "Just to make it clear and unambiguous that these things are illegal and will never be tolerated again?"



"I think he's getting two pieces of very irreconcilable advice," Lithwick said of Obama. "He's got one camp telling him exactly what you're saying: 'We can't close the door, turn the page. We need to make this right, send a signal to the world and to our own citizens that this is not okay and people need to be held accountable.'"



"I think at the same time," Lithwick continued, "he's getting an awful lot of advice that says there's no appetite in America for this. People are stressed about their pocketbooks, they're worried about the war. They just don't want to see John Yoo and David Addington and Donald Rumsfeld trotted out for Nuremburg-style trials."



"There are real good legal questions about whether [such trials] can happen," Lithwick concluded. "But we're not talking about the legal questions. We're talking about political questions."





This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Nov. 24, 2008.









Download video via RawReplay.com







