We're gonna hold you to that!

Somebody recently asked Obama whether, if elected President, his Justice Department "would aggressively go after and investigate whether crimes have been committed" by the current administration. His response:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge that because we don't have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment -- I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General -- having pursued, having looked at what's out there right now -- are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it's important-- one of the things we've got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I've said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law -- and I think that's roughly how I would look at it.

Well, we've got Bush admitting that he approved of meetings wherein officials high up in his administration basically choreographed how to torture people, and torture is against both domestic and international law. Not to mention, say, their complete disregard for FISA.

And yeah, a lot of people are going to feign outrage at even the suggestion of investigating whether wrong-doing occurred--just look at some of the comments in that post. But we cannot let them simply get away with it.