From The Attorney General's Speech

at the Federalist Society last week:

As the end of this Administration draws near, you would expect to hear broad praise for this success at keeping our Nation safe. Instead, I am afraid what we hear is a chorus with a rather more dissonant refrain. Instead of appreciation, or even a fair appraisal, of the Administration's accomplishments, we have heard relentless criticism of the very policies that have helped keep us safe. We have seen this in the media, we have seen this in the Congress, and we have heard it from the legal academy as well.

In some measure, those criticisms rest on a very dangerous form of amnesia that views the success of our counterterrorism efforts as something that undermines the justification for continuing them. In an odd way, we have become victims of our own success. In the eyes of these critics, if Al Qaeda has not struck our homeland for seven years, then perhaps it never posed much of a threat after all and we didn't need these counterterrorism policies.

......

Casual requests for criminal investigations, as well as the even more prolific conflation of legal disagreements with policy disagreements, reflect a broader trend whose institutional effects may outlast the current Administration and could well endanger our future national security.

The competing imperatives to protect the nation and to safeguard our civil liberties are worthy of public debate and discussion, and congressional oversight and review of our intelligence activities is vitally important. But it is equally important that such scrutiny be conducted responsibly, with appreciation of its institutional implications. We want lawyers to give their best advice to those who must act, and we want those who must act to know that they can rely on that advice.

Aside from grandstanding, I wonder what congress expects to gain by trying to impeach George Bush after he leaves office, or putting him and his advisers on trial. Surely they know the day will come when Barack Obama will leave office. Do they want him subject to the same threat of criminal prosecution by those who do not agree with his policies? Absolutely not. They are not even capable of recognizing legitimate questions that are being raised now about how Obama plans to run the country. After 8 long years of calling Bush every name in the book, the Democrats now want us to play nice and give their guy a chance. I'm in favor of that myself. But it takes a boatload of gall for them to ask for it.

And to threaten the President with prosecution is a flagrant disregard for the unity of the country.