BEST ARTICLE OF THE YEAR

OK, I know it's just January 10, but this Frank Rich article ("Eight Years of Madoff") is a masterpiece. After going through a short list of the criminal activities and political blunders of the Bush administration, Rich makes a cogent but cautionary point about pursuing the criminality and incompetence of the Bush years:

If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us?

Rich then points out that because nothing less than our nation's honor is at stake that "every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail." With more than $10 Trillion in new debt and obligations piled up by Bush, Rich makes what probably is the best case for pursuing investigations, or creating high-level commissions . . .

The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.

Put another way, it's not just our national honor and the rule of law that are at stake. Bush's incompetence needs to be revealed or else we could lose sight of the financial and political debacles confronting us.

- Mark