rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

so the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the imaginative interrogation techniques the CIA used on terror suspects. and everyone is getting all pissy over intelligence, and right and wrong.
so I will surmise.
here you go, an 8th grade explanation, if I were a civics teacher:

what they did, these CIA interrogators, was probably semi-legal at the time — what with the sleep deprivation, the light beatings, the mock drownings and executions, and the threats against family. all of this was legal, because the Bush administration used the Justice Department (under John “let the eagle soar” Ashcroft) and its Office of Legal Counsel to fast-track a lot of questionable shit into law.

so now you’re Eric Holder, the attorney general, you walk into a justice department that is being questioned because the Bush administration politicized it; among all the other employees in the giant, secret, federal cafeteria, it feels like a sell-out and a snitch, and it has been called one as well. and you feel you have to do something, to set yourself apart, and act on your instinct. because while being a cabinet member is the most political of appointments, you’re also supposed to retain even a modicum of self-respect and attempt to perform your job independently.
and you’re faced with mounting evidence, most of its disclosure forced by lawsuits, that CIA ended up doing some outlandish and awful things. things that produced only arguably valuable intelligence, while further scrubbing away the veneer that America’s image enjoys abroad.
and you, Eric Holder, you kind of wanted to poke at it anyway.

but then again, you’re Leon Panetta, and you’re the installed political leader of the Central Intelligence Agency, and hey, your employees were just doing what they were told, man. and Bush, he said everything was cool when he left after taking the last beer out of the fridge and the money off the dresser. and now your daughter’s knocked up. 
in short, the CIA is left holding the bag. because it’s not like there’s going to be any prosecutions of former political figures, no goddamn way. the agency will answer for this.

I am of the opinion that the CIA should, you know, get the fuck over it and accept the fact that while they are greatly appreciated for the work they do, they’re government employees in sensitive positions and therefore susceptible to wild swings in public opinion. and further, I only believe in this ’hurt morale’ bullshit on a sliding scale. because, what. is the intelligence community quit and go work for the other team? are they going to throw their hands up and say, fuck it, I’m not doing my job any more? most of them didn’t get into intelligence collecting because they thought it paid well and would get them, chicks, I hope.
no. this investigation, I think, will turn out to be nothing.

here is why:
Obama, is now going to have to manage this,
an ongoing war in Afghanistan that isn’t going smoothly, and is slacking public support only months after he committed a bunch of troops to the conflict;
a still-large, expensive deployment to Iraq; 
an economy that is only barely beginning to not be awful;
a vicious, politicized debate over health care reform;
the recent announcement of a $9 trillion budget deficit over the next decade;
and the death of America’s favorite good-natured alcoholic uncle, Ted Kennedy.
his ass can’t afford to get bogged down in another political spat. when I imagine him and these issues, I imagine him in a high school gymnasium, with each of the issues represented by a physically fit eight-year-old. but mean ones, like Children of the Corn types, and they’re trying to break him. ol’ Obama, he can handle a few of them, or maybe even a lot of them. maybe he gets pretty torn up, but still comes out on top.
but eventually, if they keep coming, if more eight-year-olds arrive, they will be hanging from his arms, and one will jump on his back. and then he will be Fucked. it’ll be like a pride of lions, riding an elephant into the ground on ‘Wild Kingdom’.
so to keep this beast at bay, he’ll politicize the Justice Department, again. he’ll say no to the investigation that should by all rights take place (and will, eventually, in some future), but I’d be surprised if this thing gets very heavy and deep. politically, it just can’t afford to. the Obama administration can’t keep letting it pile on like this, because it’s entirely too early into its tenure to be taking so many kicks to the shins.