It would take eight weeks, not eight minutes, to recount all of the Bush Regime’s transgressions in full (for they have had eight years to do their carnage in and have not wasted any time, even now, when pardons and other further transgressions are still possible). We wrote a book about this (Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney) as did several other authors. Those books are indispensable reading for those who want to understand the sheer magnitude of Bush and Cheney’s crimes and the origins and agenda of their movement.
I’m not going to try to recount all of their crimes here. I’m going to cut to the chase and focus on the most important element of all: the fact that the Bush Regime represents the culmination (to this point), and logical outcome, of the trajectory that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan: Free market and Christian fundamentalists in charge; “faith-based community” dictating over the “reality-based community;” political power untethered from – and openly defiant and contemptuous of - the law.
The rule of law and of reason was replaced under Bush and Cheney by the rule of men.
This is much more dangerous than any of the specific, infamous, and egregious sins of commission and omission by the Bush Regime. For if their transgressions are allowed to pass unprosecuted and unsanctioned, then the precedent stands and has been established. It doesn’t matter if this new administration refuses to do what Bush and Cheney and the US government as a whole have done for the last eight years. It doesn’t matter if Obama ends torture, closes GITMO, ceases rendition, restores habeas corpus, declines to use signing statements and stops the ubiquitous government spying. It doesn’t matter how high toned his rhetoric and how different his administration’s actions and policies. It doesn’t matter if Obama turns out to walk on water. If Obama does not prosecute the Bush Regime’s crimes, if he declines to “look backward” and insists on only “looking forward,” then his presidency is a failure: not only do infamous atrocities go unpunished and the victims of those atrocities go unrecognized, but any future president can do what Bush and Cheney have done and more. The game is over. Checkmate. The wrong side wins.
The explicit declaration that the law is whatever the president says it is, and that the President is above any and all laws, represents a return to Emperors and Kings, to pre-Magna Carta, to feudal conceptions of the nature of political rule where the law was whatever the king or queen said it was.
The Bush Regime is living proof that a presidency that invokes “national security” and “terror” can do any and all things that it wants under the rubric of “protecting the nation,” and Congress and the mass media (even if some of them grumble a little) will co-operate like nervous Nellies and declare: “Here, Mr. (or Ms.) President, have some more.”
Bush and Cheney used 9/11 and the “war on terror” to claim the right under the Bush Doctrine (Sarah Palin, pay attention) to launch wars on countries that have not attacked us first (the highest war crime of all, according to the UN Charter), to use torture and carry out indefinite detentions, to shred civil liberties (your right not to be spied upon by your government and to confront your accusers in a court of law, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, to free speech and assembly), to defy Congressional law and intent, and to say “go f*ck yourself” to anyone who doesn’t toe their line (as Cheney said in the Senate and as the White House said to New Orleans, to the world, and to Joseph Wilson et al).
As bad as the economic crisis is, and as bad as it’s going to get over the next few years, their economic policies are just the tip of the iceberg of what they have done.
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