Apparently, it’s okay to claim that one party is better than the other party, and we’re permitted and encouraged as citizens to choose one party or the other in electoral contests, but going after criminal wrongdoing is not okay. Voting in another administration is okay. Prosecuting criminals is not. It doesn’t matter how egregious and how consequential or how barbaric or how fundamental to the law and principles the crimes committed by public officials. They are not to be punished for that kind of thing, because, well, only uncivilized nations do that! Civilized nations let old presidents and their gang of thieves and murderers retire in fine fashion to travel the world giving speeches for five or six figures and up. Civilized nations don’t put their past or present presidents before the International Court for crimes against humanity. Civilized nations let torture be done and pat the torturers on the backs and say: What a fine fellow you are!
As Charles Krauthammer, Obama’s recent dinner partner, notes with pleasure in a January 16, 2009 Washington Post Op-Ed:
“Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls ‘campaign rhetoric’ and the policy choices he must make as president…Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds – the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition. It's not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It's the continuity of policy.”
Krauthammer goes on to approvingly cite Newsweek’s inauguration eve’s cover headline: "Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney's Vision of Power."
This is change? The new president adopting the old Vice’s vices?
If you fail to right wrongdoing and you fail to air lawbreaking and sins of an administration, you are allowing and guaranteeing that the festering corpse of those crimes will infect and rise again, like the Undead, to consume the living of today and tomorrow.
Robert Parry again, on January 17, 2009:
“Obama appears poised to make many of the same mistakes that marked the start of the Clinton presidency 16 years ago, when another Bush was leaving office in the midst of an economic recession and the Establishment (led by its chief mouthpiece, the Washington Post) was nearly unanimous on the need to look forward, not backward.
“Then, there was widespread (and bipartisan) agreement with President George H.W. Bush’s pardons of six Iran-Contra defendants, short-circuiting a trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that was set to begin in early 1993. That trial would have altered the historical understanding of the scandal by revealing the high-level approval of crimes by President Reagan and Vice President Bush.
“The Weinberger trial also would have put front and center the concept of an all-powerful President. In effect, the Iran-Contra Affair was a way station in the restoration of the imperial presidency, from its collapse in Watergate to its post-9/11 resurrection under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.”
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