The American people are not its government, but if the American people don’t at some point make the strongest statement to repudiate the policies of these "Bathists" like Cheney who have shaped and implemented Bush administration torture policy, they become co-responsible. The precedents have to be undone, and the only way I can think to do it is by putting the architects of American torture policy on trial for war crimes.
Obama, I’m sure, doesn’t want to go there. It will be hard for him to square it in the public imagination with his main priority to build unity and bipartisanship. [Update: He says he will if there is willful criminality.] The GOP culture is all about bitch-slapping its opposition; the Democrats have shown that they are all too willing to be slapped around. Even if a Obama decided to go after these GOP Bathists, he probably would not be supported by the Pelosi/Reid crowd and the the Clinton DLC types.
Bill Clinton showed the way when he let sleeping dogs lie when it came to following up on the crimes of the Reagan/Bush 1 administration’s complicity with Iran Contra and the the release of the American hostages on Reagan’s inauguration day. Now he’s best buds with Bush the elder. Anybody who’s half awake knows what happened during the Reagan-Bush years and is outraged, but because Clinton did not flush it out, the mentality continued to fester and to retain legitimacy, and it’s that same mentality that brought us the Iraq debacle.
There were all kinds of debate even among liberals about the legitimacy of taking out a bad guy like Saddam. If we could do it in Yugoslavia, why not in Iraq? Leave aside the abstract moral questions about preemptive war, etc.– the biggest reason the Iraq War should have been opposed was because of the mentality of the people who were its architects. We knew who they were. This was not an abstract moral question; it was a question of trusting these people and their crazy ideas about American power. Again, anybody who knows been in the least bit awake in the last thirty years knows the stupidity, the brutishness, and horror that this mentality produces. You didn’t have to be a genius to predict what the outcome in Iraq was likely to be; you just had to know a little bit about history and the mentality of people like Rumsfeld and Cheney who have been around since the Nixon administration. Honestly, can anybody really be surprised?
The Cheney mentality is what must be flushed out into the open and soundly repudiated once and for all.The point is that you can’t just pretend that it’s normal or that it’s one legitimate point of view that should be part of the debate. No. The Republicans infected with the Cheney mentality are the American Bathists, and they must be delegitimized and marginalized once and for all. You cannot move forward so long as the
people infected with this illness still remain in the bureaucracy, and
their mentality is legitimated by its spokesmen in Congress. As they did during the Clinton years, they will bide their time waiting for their opportunity to
return to power.
I know there a many decent people who incline toward the
"conservative" values of the Republican Party, but it should be clear
to anyone by now that the Republican Party is not run by people who the
least interest in conservative principles. The party is run by thugs.
Others who consider themselves moderates in a show of idealism and
independent thinking say they will vote for the candidate who they
think is best no matter what his or her party affiliation. But it’s
not about the individual. How many individual Republicans have
consistently stood up against this sick Republican mentality? Chafee
in Rhode Island? Hagel from Nebraska? Who else? Others like Spector,
Graham, and Warner sometimes talk sense, but they vote with the pack.
You can’t stand against the machine and survive for long. It should
be clear that regardless of the decency of individual Republicans, the
GOP is dominated by a kind of sickness that derives from a obsession
with power. It fosters a mentality that celebrates the brutish and
denigrates the intelligent and prudent. There were many decent people
who lived in the South during the days of Jim Crow, but they weren’t
running things. It’s the same now with the Republican Party.
Like the mentality of the Southern segregationists, it is a
mentality that infects everything it touches with brutish horror–even
in small things, the things we never hear about. Check out This American Life‘s
podcast from a couple of weeks ago entitled "The Audacity of
Government," particularly Act Two (h/t Jason). It describes precisely
the thing that small government conservatives are supposed to hate–an
unfettered and unaccountable executive branch that is governed only by
the principle that its will must prevail no matter how unfounded in
common sense or common decency. It’s raison d’etre is simply the
exercise of power for its own sake.
How is a John Yoo, David Addington, or Dick Cheney even possible?
How is it that we have a system that allows people like that into such
critical positions of influence? The answer lies in that they are
supported by an entire governmental culture shaped over almost thirty
years since Reagan. It is a sick, sick culture, and the Democrats are
almost as bad for their collaboration with it. The bureaucracy is
dominated by the power mentality groupthink that these sick men
represent because people like them have been dominating the bureaucracy
for all but eight years since 1980. People with a shred of decency
don’t last in this culture. They leave, they write their books, and
then everyone else goes out and mows the lawn. And when election time
comes around, as it did in 2004, a majority voted to keep these
criminals in office.
What is the matter with us? And now people are seriously
considering voting for John McCain? Why should this man who has done
everything he can to ingratiate himself to the GOP power establishment
in recent years so he can finally realize his personal ambitions be
taken seriously. Because he was a POW forty years ago? How is it
possible to take such a man seriously? I do not see an honorable man
here. I see an ambitious man. He may articulate a position or two that
is calculated to show he does have a shred of decency, but as we saw
during the Military Commission Act fight, he Spectored. We have no
reason to believe anything he says. He’s a militarist, a fatuous
jingoist, and when push comes to shove just another GOP stooge despite
whatever reputation he might have for being the Republican maverick.
So the other Republican stooges in Congress and the stooges in the
media will all scream bloody murder if war crimes investigations are
initiated during an Obama administration. They’ll dismiss it as petty
political retaliation. Obama won’t have the stomach for it, but there
is no reconciling with this sick mentality because the very nature of
the sickness is to resist at all cost reconciliation and compromise. It
must get its own way. The only possibility to create a genuine unity
government is to weaken and marginalize anybody who has been infected
with the Cheney power sickness. These Bathists must be repudiated–if
war crimes trials are not the way, then some other way. But we cannot
let sleeping dogs lie.
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