Eric Holder blew it as attorney general. His replacement will, too,

Systemic issues might be too much for any one person

Holder
(Image credit: (Win McNamee/Getty Images))

The best thing about Eric Holder's time as the U.S. attorney general was that he was the first one in decades to really care about civil rights. The worst thing was, well basically everything else.

Holder, who yesterday announced his resignation as attorney general, isn't a bad synecdoche for the Obama administration. The first black attorney general, by all accounts a committed liberal with a special concern for civil rights, was also the guy who rubber-stamped the NSA's dragnet surveillance program and the CIA's assassination of American citizens. He prosecuted neither Bush-era torturers nor any of the thousands of high-level Wall Street fraudsters from the financial crisis (save one).

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.