Thursday, November 13, 2008

Pardon Watch

If there is a villian in the destruction of America it is not George W. Bush, who is nothing more than a C minus student conveniently foisted in front of the electorate by a powerful neo-conservative marketing team, corrosive in its evil. Bush never, not even for one day, lived up to his job. He was the ugly contestant giving beauty padgent answers so bad that reporters simply tired of asking them. Bush was the stuck and bleeding animal driven into the waters to attract piranas away from the real actors in his administration, only he was so distasteful the fish would never finish their meal. He lived on to never answer their questions as often as his keeper felt it necessary.

No, the real villian of the Bush Administration is Dick Cheney. The acts laid at his door include torture, war, domestic spying, and the enabling of Karl Roves worst offenses. One or both of them committed high treason. Serious articles are now coming out that depict Cheney's usurpation of Presidential power. We should read them and maintain our anger at what has been done to our democracy in order to derive the energy it will take to cut out this infection which is even now looking for its next host. In the meantime we must be aware that the forces that brought us our national disaster are still at work, even as Dick Cheney slithers out from under the presidency into darkness.

Neo-conservatism is even now searching around our Nation looking for a congenial bumbling front, a typhoid Mary, which it can use as a host to reinsert itself into the halls of Democracy in order to destroy from within. Someone who will say things like,
"Well, I could think of -- of any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a Vice President, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today."
Someone the Press will draw fire from the media while neo-cons glut themselves on America's vitals.

A current article documents and analyzes Cheney, his rise to power, and his use of Bush as a willing puppet.


Bush is the front man, and is known as such. He takes questions. If he answers them badly, still he is there for us to see. To address Cheney separately would be to challenge the supremacy of the President—a breach of etiquette that itself supposes a lack of the evidence that would justify the challenge.

The fact that Bush's answers are so inadequate, from a defect of mental sharpness and retentiveness as well as dissimulation, kills the appetite for further questions. But the fact that the questions have, in a formal sense, been asked and answered lets the vice- president off the hook. Thus the completeness of his silence and seclusion, for long intervals ever since September 11, 2001, is an aberration that has never been rebuked and has often gone unnoticed. "There is a cloud over the vice-president," said the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his summation at the trial of Lewis Libby. "That cloud is something you just can't pretend isn't there."


The Co-President at Work
By David Bromwich


It is long and depressing but must be read for a clearer picture of the disease vector of Neo-conservatism. Understanding may give rise to an innoculation against a recurrence. Maybe it won't.

But maybe Bush knows all this and somehwere deep inside himself, he actually loves his country. Maybe he holds some level of anger at Dick Cheney for his part in Bush's presidential legacy as "Worst Ever!" Maybe, as a parting act, Bush will actually do something to serve his country.

If there were one thing George W. Bush could do to really help his country, it would be to refrain from issuing pardons to Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and his minions. There are very many of us who want a complete public airing of all that went wrong under his presidency. We need a laundry list of what has to be corrected. I hold out little hope.

I look for blanket pardons to be issued that will be broad enough to include the charge of High Treason, though that wording will not be used.

Peace,

Steve

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