Okay, “Bharara in.” is wishful thinking on my part but Mr. Holder is out as AG.  Will anyone miss him?  Hoisted from the Comments section of the NY Times’ piece on his departure, “Attorney General Eric Holder, Prominent Liberal Voice in Obama Administration, Is Resigning“… (The Times characterization of Holder as a prominent liberal is…  interesting.  It begs the question, what exactly qualifies one as a liberal these days anyway?  But I digress.)

Glassyeyed from Indiana:

Real liberals would put banksters in jail.

You don’t say.   Here’s Michael from Tampa:

Let’s count the number of ways Holder will go down as one of the worst AG’s in history:

-Operation Fast & Furious
-Naming reporters “criminal co-consipirators” under the Espionage Act of 1917 to gain access to his records
-Associated Press subpoenas
-Advocated for and justified the use of drones to kill US citizens even on US soil

Those are just off the top of my head. I’m sure I am forgetting a whole lot more.

Yes, Michael, you forgot about the whole non-prosecution of financial misbehavior business that Glassyeyed alluded to.  Garrus from Richmond, VA with a reminder:

Holder was hardly a “liberal voice” when it came to the biggest, most far-reaching question of this administration, namely how to deal with the corporate lawbreaking that created the subprime mortgage crisis, and the worst economy since the Depression.

Holder presided over a federal legal response that let the banks most responsible for all the damage to the economy off the hook with small fines. Most of all, Holder steadfastly avoided criminal prosecution either of the Banks themselves or their executives.

In fact, Holder publicly discouraged any real effort to hold the banks or their leaders responsible for their actions, on the theory that doing so would threaten “stability.” As if putting the banks above the law didn’t threaten the economy, and everything worthwhile about our way of life, as well.

No, despite his leadership on sentencing reform, and sporadic support for voting rights, Holder has been a timid AG, mainly concerned with propping up the economic establishment in this country, despite its mistakes and offenses.

Now, it’s probably true that he merely shared the White House’s concern with keeping Sec. Geithner’s pet banks happy no matter what. Still, his public excuses for going easy on Bank of America, Citigroup and others have helped undermine the public’s confidence in the rule of law, and in the public’s ability to protect itself from economic power, the most important legal prerogative.

Finally, Matt Taibbi from a few years back:

Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report – the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.

In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully “aligned” with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.

If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?

… Holder didn’t need to be creative in the Goldman case…. He could have had a dozen easy convictions just on the evidence in that report, and if he had been creative, if he had used his vast power to roll up the guilty and flip them into more revelations, then he’d have had enough cases to last the AG’s office the next decade.

But the Holders of the world do not want to be creative when the targets are politically influential rich people. Instead, they use their creativity against Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, immigrant housekeepers, and guys who knock over liquor stores. They like to flex muscles against bank robbers, celebrity tax evaders (we can’t have Wesley Snipes on the loose!), truck hijackers, and drug dealers….

Holder’s non-decision on Goldman is more than unsurprising. It amounts to an official announcement that the government is no longer in the business or prosecuting smart criminals. It’s pathetic. The one thing you pay any lawyer to have is balls, and our nation’s top attorney has none.

I don’t think I’ll miss Mr. Holder.  Bring on Preet Bharara.

ADDENDUM:  The Progressive’s list of Holder’s “Five Crucial Failures“:

1. Refusal to prosecute George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld for breaking the treaty against torture and the statutes that also prohibit it.
2. Letting Wall Street CEOs off the hook for misconduct related to mortgage derivatives, misleading investors and clients, and crashing the economy.
3. Prosecution of more whistleblowers than any other Attorney General, and using the 1917 Sedition Act to go after them.  [See here, here, and here for more on whistleblower prosecutions.]
4. Defending the NSA’s blanket collection of U.S. citizens’ phone calls, and the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens on the Internet. And he invoked the doctrine of “State Secrets” to get away with it.
5. Justifying Pres. Obama’s assassination doctrine, and saying that it applied even to U.S. citizens

The list is both accurate and damning.