If Hillary Rodham Clinton is named Secretary of State by Barack Obama, I confidently predict that she will "go rogue," rampaging through Foggy Bottom like a savage, drunken elephant, stomping mid-level diplomats to jelly, dashing out the brains of beareaucrats with one flick of her mighty trunk. Then she will barrel furiously down the avenues of the nation's capital, mind inflamed with the feral lust to destroy, by savage instinct alone seeking the White House, where a trembling Joe Biden struggles frantically to fit a dart envenomed with powerful drugs into the barrel of a tranquilizer rifle in time. Too late! Several tons of frenzied former New York junior senator are upon him with an earth-shattering trumpet blast of fury primeval! The man from Scranton is pulverized! His entrails splatter, defiling the alabaster columns of the beloved Shrine to Democracy with crimson gore! In the Oval Office, a quivering President Obama weeps softly behind his desk as the venerable structure shudders and crumbles with the ferocious violence of her inexorable advance, her unquenchable thirst for pachydermal vengeance! Even at the last possible moment, when the enraged Clinton bursts the Oval Office door into matchsticks and bears down on him, unstoppable, elephantine, slavering, one last thought, pure and true, rings in his brain like an orison: "Well, I guess she's still more of a 'team player' than Lieberman."
Anyway I bet that's what's probably going to happen. And I mean this quite literally.
MORE. The likelihood -- even the practical inevitability -- of such scenarios coming to pass makes me wonder at the blase attitude of some progressive bloggers about this sort of personnel decision on Obama's part. Get active, people! You know what to do!
FURTHER. Meditating on what Mithras says here. Sure, it's unlikely that we're going to get prosecutions of the Bushite junta as a practical matter, though this does not necessarily mean someone is naive or foolish for calling for such prosecutions -- it's not like there is not a good case to be made for such investigations, morally and probably even legally. Put it this way; I was perfectly aware in 2002 that no matter what I thought or said or did, Bush was going to attack Iraq, and that this was a mistake. Do I regret going to marches against the war, though? No, not really. If the case is to be made, make the case. Even if it goes nowhere politically, that doesn't mean it's useless -- even politically.
Here's what I mean. If I were Obama (and who is to say I'm not?), I would be looking back at the record of the Bush years as a kind of treasure chest stuffed with "get out of jail free" cards. Look how much mileage the wingnuts still get even today out of the Clinton "scandals" -- the usually silly nature of their complaints aside, there's no question that one of the standard plays in the Bush playbook was, everytime they got in some sort of trouble, throw out some sort of cockamamie Clinton reference and boom! A Distraction!
Now, even without a formal investigation or special prosecutor, there are tons of resources for ferreting out secrets available to the executive branch, especially with a legislature of the same party, and loads of journalists thirsty of "access" and leaks. Obama is no fool, and his people are hardnosed. If they're smart, they'll be able to unveil or move along or leak a Bushite scandal maybe even once a week for eight solid years. It's not like there's any shortage of ammo lying around, you know. And when this stuff comes out -- and it is in the nature of stuff like this to come out, especially when there is so much political advantage to be gained from it -- among the people yelling about it will be those who feel vindicated by having called for it years in advance. It's not really to anyone's disadvantage or discredit that they want to exert this kind of pressure now, as it could pay off later.
So I for one think Obama is smart in not pressing this kind of investigation/reprisal stuff now. It's not the annoying "keeping the powder dry" meme; in this particular case, that actually makes sense, and I'm not really that worried that the most damaging information won't ever appear.
As for the now-infamous "one Senate Democratic aide" quote, shit, that sounds a lot like noted asshole Marshall Wittman, who frankly has less influence now than The Left, on blogs or elsewhere. Lieberman is on his way to becoming as beloved a figure as, say, Al D'Amato, so screw him anyhow.