Jonathan Turley for Attorney General
Since the heady days leading up to and immediately following the 2008 election, leftside mainstream media (MSM) outlets such as MSNBC and AirAmerica (and The New York Times and Mother Jones and The Nation) have elevated the acceptance – nay, the support – of the Obama Administration’s anything-but-progressive ideals to high art.
This is our First Black President, after all. We must scrupulously avoid deriding him as the abject failure he is, rather than call out his utter spinelessness and purely political handling of Whatever May Cross His Desk. Otherwise, we might never again elect another person of color, nor even (gasp!) a woman!
Meanwhile…
Over at DOJ, there is another First Black Leader. He is, of course, Eric Holder, and as sometime MSNBC legal analyst and full-time George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley made no absolutely bones about saying today on public radio’s “Here and Now,” Holder is a failure of similarly abject proportion.
Turley has been perhaps the only person appearing regularly in the MSM who has relentlessly peppered Holder with sharp, fully justified criticism, extending – by way of the president’s oversight responsibility – to Obama himself. Holder has failed to do what he promised during his confirmation hearings: Pursue justice without regard to where that pursuit may lead, and who it may incriminate – and the case can be made, as Turley does in the linked clip, that this failure is one of pure and purposeful political calculation, at the behest of Obama’s White House.
As Turley notes, Holder has failed on torture, warrantless wiretapping, and a host of other big, broad legal issues; issues on which the nation holding itself out as The Keeper of the Flame of Justice simply cannot – simply must not – fail.
Much as I’d like to see it, Turley will likely never become Attorney General. But with MSNBC planning to put Corporate Democrat Lawrence O’Donnell in the 10 p.m. time slot this fall, and knowing how that network has always sought a suitable competitor on legal issues to Fox’s Greta Van Susteren (remember the abysmal, aborted “Verdict with Dan Abrams”??) one can’t help but wonder when Turley will be accorded the platform that his keen mind and unapologetic analysis have earned.
The Tea Party begs that we uphold the Constitution. Let’s see how they react to somebody who not only understands the document, but has the legal chops to explain the clearly progressive vision of its framers.
And who knows? “Turley at Ten” might even persuade me to tune in again.