Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Author Of "In My Time" Should Be Doing Time

It is unfortunate, indeed unforgivable, that the current administration is so determined to look forward, not backward, that we have to endure yet another self-congratulatory account of the criminal conspiracy known as the Bush Administration.  (See previously, Bush Rehab; Known Knowns.)

Dick Cheney, like the other members of the cabal, is not only free to write a memoir that admits torture, wiretapping and other high crimes, without any fear of investigation, much less prosecution, but he has the temerity to promote sales by insisting that it would have been "unethical and immoral" not to have done these things, and to insist that he would unhesitatingly do it again.  Instead of a meaningful reckoning that would have quashed such arrogant, offensive and dangerous claptrap, we get a book tour.

Glenn Greenwald sums it up well:
Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted -- and further enriched -- as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunized.  As he embarks on his massive publicity-generating media tour of interviews, Cheney faces no indictments or criminal juries, but rather reverent, rehabilitative tributes.

2 comments :

Stephen said...

Of course you're exactly right. At the outset of the Obama administration, when it became evident that it was not going to prosecute any member of the Bush administration for any transgression of law, it seemed like a political calculation to curry favor with the Republicans. A Faustian bargain that, while compromising (severely) Obama's presumed principles and ethics -- and, no less, his oath to uphold the Constitution -- would clear a path for him to push ahead with his presumably progressive legislative agenda. So, Mr. President, how's that Faustian bargain thingy workin' out for ya?

Jim Thome is more deserving of being elected to the Hall of Fame than Obama is of being re-elected to The White House. But whatcha gonna do?

lonbud said...

There is a special Google+ Circle (in Hell) reserved for Dick (and George).

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