The New York Times — reading tea leaves from President-elect Obama’s interview by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — reports that The One is characteristically speaking with fork-tongue when it comes to the “reckoning” that his Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, has promised the hard left.

The point of the story by Obama boosters — er, I mean dispassionate journalists — David Johnston and Charlie Savage is plainly to promote the disarming party line that Obama is a reasonable, moderate pragmatist. He doesn’t really want to look back at all those bad old Bush war crimes he spent the campaign demagoguing — the “domestic spying,” the “torture,” the “illegal detentions,” the “suspension of habeas corpus,” etc. He’s a forward-looking kinda guy. But on the other hand (there being always many hands when Obama speaks), “there should be prosecutions if ’somebody has blatantly broken the law.’” Of course, you can’t know whether someone has broken the law unless you do the investigations that Obama is oh so reluctant to do. So Holder et al will have no choice but to continue “evaluating interrogation and detention issues and … examin[ing] ‘past practices.’”

And isn’t this just ducky for everyone? The left gets its investigations (though maybe not prosecutions — that’s kept vague); the new Obama/Holder fan club on the right gets to admire what reasoned restraint (a lack of “bloodlust,” as our friend Brad Berenson calls it) the new administration is exhibiting (and don’t bother them with trifles like Holder’s stemwinder last June for a swooning crowd of Bush-haters at the American Constitution Society); and, meanwhile, the unmistakable message to our intelligence community is: better lawyer up, and think twice before you do anything, anything, for which you might be investigated later.