We! Magazine
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
Republicans have abused the power of the Presidential pardon since Gerald Ford used it to preemptively pardon the criminal Richard Nixon. It was argued that Americans, with their delicate sensitivities, weren’t mature enough to cope with the idea that an elected official might face a fair and public trial for crimes he may have committed or had committed while in office.
If the JFK assassination undermined American innocence (and Gerald Ford tried to spin fairy tales about that, too), then the Nixon pardon undermined American confidence in themselves as a place where justice could be served.
Lightning struck again some 18 years later, when George Bush used the power of the pardon to kick apart the case being pursued against the criminal Ronald Reagan, and in which some scummy little felons and traitors such as Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy got to run free and sneer loudly at the country that gave them their undeserved liberty.
Losing in Vietnam didn’t do nearly as much damage to American self-respect as the sight of G. Gordon Liddy braying into his radio microphone that people should shoot federal agents in the head as a way of demonstrating their Liddy-style patriotism.
A lot of people watched this, and watched right wingers openly gloating over it, and wondered what the fuck had gone wrong with America.
And then, for the next eight years, the same vicious and amoral clowns who guffawed over the sight of Nixon lazing in the California sun and tried to make a tin hero out of the moronic Reagan, tried to destroy the Clinton presidency by impeaching him over trivia.
Now, we have a crowd that makes the Nixon scummies and the Reagan sleazers look like pikers. For the past eight years, we’ve seen the most criminal and anti-American administration in history. They haven’t settled for third rate burglaries and selling arms to terrorists, no. They stole an election to get in, and then proceeded to spend years looting the national treasury, lied the country into a war whose real aim was to abet in that looting, let terrorists attack the country, refused a serious investigation into it, and used it to pass measures that slashed the rights of Americans while politicizing the judicial branch of the government, and attempted to establish one-party rule, supported by a corrupted judiciary and a crooked voting system.
And while they were at it, they committed war crimes, and gave America the same reputation the old Soviet Union used to have, of torture and unjust imprisonments without trial and secret prison camps.
They robbed the country blind, and humiliated and debased it in the process. They didn’t govern America; they didn’t even rule it. They simply raped it.
And now, mercifully, the reign of these vicious, anti-American little Republican scumbags is coming to an end.
But will any of them ever pay for their crimes? Trillions of dollars have gone missing from the common weal, either sunk into wars for profit, siphoned off to the undeserving rich, or evaporated in the implosion of a capitalist bubble that was given all the internal air pressure it wanted. Three thousand people died in 9/11, and another 5,000 Americans have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ll probably never know how many died in Iraq just for living there, or how many were herded off to American gulags to die of torture, or spend years wondering if they would ever get a trial, let alone ever be set free. Elections were suborned, and Clinton was hardly the only public servant to be attacked by the Republican slime-and-destroy machine, now in the paws of the nation’s district attorneys. At least one governor was framed and sent to jail. In today’s paper, there was a story of a indictment of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales in which the judge, another corrupt, bent Republican stooge, actually tried to dismiss the charges before they were legally filed.
What the fuck is wrong with America, you ask? It got taken over by corrupt, amoral Republican crooks, and nobody has the balls to make them pay for their crimes. And now, they are just clinging on, hoping that the entire country won’t collapse before the mess is foisted off on President-elect Obama, and trying like hell to blame him for the situation they created.
And while they are doing that, they are waiting for Putsch’s preemptive pardons, the ones that ensure that they will never have to face their responsibility for the millions of lives lost and the trillions of dollars squandered or stolen. They’ll never have to stand in open court and explain why they insisted Saddam had nukes when he didn’t, or why NORAD was ordered to stand down on the morning of 9/11, or why Governor Siegleman was sent to jail, or why Putsch suddenly fired all those Federal attorneys and replaced them with ones willing to investigate Democratic candidates for office.
The Republicans, who laughingly describe themselves as the party of personal responsibility, desperately need those presidential pardons issued preemptively so they can skate, never pay a dime, and crow that if they were criminals, why weren’t they ever put on trial?
If that doesn’t sicken you, then you are morally bankrupt or worse, a Republican.
That’s why it is so important that impeachment proceedings be started now in the Democratic House of Representatives against George W. Bush. He won’t actually be impeached in the 58 days remaining before he leaves office, making an impeachment moot. There isn’t time.
But the Constitution, the one which grants Presidents the power to pardon, has one exception: A president may pardon, “except in cases of impeachment.” As I read it, it means that not only may a president not pardon any high public officials who are facing impeachment, but it means that a president who is facing the impeachment process may not use it in any way that could undermine the process against himself.
Putsch will abuse it and use it to take himself and his cronies off the hook. Don’t doubt that for an instant.
And don’t doubt that it will be another emotional and moral body blow to Americans, who had just regained a little self-respect and a lot of hope from electing Obama and throwing off the Republican reign of sleaze.
It isn’t just a matter of vindictiveness against Putsch, although personally I would be delighted if he spent the rest of his natural life rotting away in a jail cell. It’s because America, which has always prided itself on justice, and avenging wrongs, has faced terrible injustice and wrongs for the past eight years, and needs the opportunity to address it through rule of law, in open court, and by the standards of the civilized world.
Don’t let Putsch get away with his crimes. Impeach the little bastard now, and make him eventually face a jury to explain himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment