Peter Daou’s Huffington Post column on the imperative for the Obama administration to restore the rule of law without hesitation raises excellent points about both what change really must mean under Obama and how the netroots community is trying to ensure this happens. Demands for investigation, transparency, and accountability in the face of Let’s-Move-On-itis common to Washington Democrats and Beltway pundits are not, as Daou says, “the rantings of immature outsiders and political neophytes.” Daou writes:

But as always, the progressive community, a far more efficient thinking machine than a handful of strategists and advisers, is looking ahead and raising a unified alarm. The message is this: anything less than absolute moral clarity from Democrats, who now control the levers of power, will enshrine Bush’s abuses and undermine the rule of law for generations to come.

I feel as if we’re a country balanced on the blade of a knife.  Decisive action, done out of moral clarity to restore America’s good name, can save us. There must be unequivocal support for the rule of law. This should not be negotiable, because anything less will ensure that there is no effective break from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. We will instead have a largely better actor who is less likely to move to systematically undermine the rule of law, who presides over a system that is functionally identical in mechanism and meaning to what was constructed under Bush and Cheney.

It’s hard to think of a more troubling outcome with the change in administrations than one which leaves us in a place we thought we had left when we voted on November 4th, 2008.