Who needs accountability

    By Fester:

Forgetting about Watergate and allowing for a rapid rehabitiliation of most of the Nixonian senior leadership worked out well.

Ignoring Iran Contra and allowing a President to remain out of the loop had no longer lasting harm.

Going to war based on either lies, contempt for the truth or amazing idiocy has had no long lasting harm.  Replacing US Attorneys for not pursuing spurious voter fraud cases has increased confidence in our electoral system.  Seeing a city drown has been a net positive for this country.  Burning a CIA asset with alleged sources in Iran has increased our knowledge and decreased uncertainty.

Actually requiring accountability and potential criminal liability for these actions would be completely uncivil and counterproductive.  It is not like the ghosts of Richard Nixon would ever be allowed to haunt another White House (hi Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld), our political process is too mature for that.  Who could imagine an ignorant Know Nothing could become President or nominated for Vice President for any party larger than the Constitution Party. 

That would just be uncivil.  Our institutions are too strong to be bothered with accountability. 

Or at least that is what the Wise Old Men of Washington want to argue:

"At a conference in Washington this week, former department criminal division chief Robert S. Litt asked that the new administration avoid fighting old battles that could be perceived as vindictive, such as seeking to prosecute government officials involved in decisions about interrogation and the gathering of domestic intelligence. Human rights groups have called for such investigations, as has House Judiciary CommitteeJohn Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.).

"It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries," Litt said. "It would really spend a lot of the bipartisan capital Obama managed to build up."

This is despite the fact that Obama really did not build up a lot of bipartisan capital if you define that in terms of the number of Republicans who self-identify as Republicans who voted for him.  This is despite the fact that we need accountability for a departure from the historical explicit and implicit constitutional norms (six years of self-pants shitting is not a valid defense).  This is despite the fact that there is a consensus that everything that has been done in the past eight years will have to be undone. 

Political considerations affected every crevice of the department during the Bush years, from the summer intern hiring program to the dispensing of legal advice about detainee interrogations, according to reports by the inspector general and testimony from bipartisan former DOJ officials at congressional hearings....

"The infusion of politics into the Justice Department and an abdication of responsibility by its leaders have dealt a severe blow," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the panel's ranking Republican, wrote in an opinion piece last month. "Great damage has been done to the credibility and effectiveness of the Justice Department."

No, it is best for this country that Georgetown cocktail parties are enjoyable and open to all. 

Fuck accountability; that is for the plebes.

Comments

[pwapvt]

That really burns me. Someone, anyone, needs to held accountable for rampant lawbreaking that has occurred by the Bush Admin. We have to put that all away because we have to play nice. Play fucking nice? With the evil bastards who wouldn't play nice if their lives depended on it?

[anderson]

Fester,

You're right, of course. Criminal prosecution for illegal activity really is just "for the plebes."

And this phrase, which we hear so much whenever a Republican administration is on the way out, "healing the country and moving forward," is really getting old. I can't believe establishment jackasses get away this tired mantra, over and over again. But they do, and it is trotted with regularity.

I hear this crap from Democrats, too. I had a conversation about impeachment with someone who called himself a "Democratic adviser." Heard the same crap from him: too partisan and politically dangerous (that is their real concern). And so I pointed out the disturbing pattern of the last forty years:

A Republican administration gets caught doing something (or many things) that are completely illegal -- no question about it. Investigations reveal the nature of the dealings and show them to be illegal. Some low hanging fruit are convicted, the next administration comes in and pardons the convicted, who then go on to host shows on Fox News and talk radio. Some may have served some time, most do not. Even in the case where the president was directly implicated with his own voice, pardons issue forth "for the good of the country." We saw this with Nixon. Iran-Contra investigations managed to indeed show that Reagan was well aware of what was going on, but he managed to escape direct indictment, probably also for the good of the country. America, after all, loved Reagan. He won the Cold War! Can't convict that.

And now here we are again. Only this time, there isn't a follow-on GOP president to start ladling out the pardons. Investigations of the Bush regime have uncovered many clearly illegal activities and yet, what has happened subsequent to those investigations? Nothing. Democrats investigated and then walked away. And now they are promising to do nothing, because the country needs to heal.

It isn't the country that needs healing, and they know it. The pattern exhibited in American politics in the last 40 years -- Republican criminality pardoned and condoned -- is distressing enough, but the crimes have gotten worse, while the punishments less and fewer. Now the worst, most extravagantly criminal regime in the modern era is going skip off into the sunset so that the country can heal.

Enough of this! Put these scoundrels in jail! That's the kind of healing I can believe in. It won't happen, of course, because the Dems are too politically timid to prosecute deserving GOP criminals. I don't recall anyone talking about "healing the country" when the hatchet men in the GOP and the Wall Street Journal were calling Clinton every name imaginable and prosecuting him for something most of the GOP have been caught doing at some point or another. Rule of law! then ruled our land. But now? Now, we need healing.

Fuck those weak kneed bastards.

[Mark]

"This is despite the fact that Obama really did not build up a lot of bipartisan capital if you define that in terms of the number of Republicans who self-identify as Republicans who voted for him."

This (meaning Litt) also ignores why the Republicans (and Republicans-in-exile who now call themselves independents) who voted for Obama did so. Here's a hint - it wasn't health care, it wasn't taxes, and it wasn't the bailout.

[rmd]

It may be that the congressional Democrats have absorbed better than you the lessons of Watergate / Whitewater: that if the Dems go after the Repubs for doing illegal stuff, the Repubs will go after the Dems for doing legal stuff, and they may well have enough prosecutors and judges to make it stick.

[zak822]

What bipartisan capital?

When did the Republicans start reaching across the aisle or working in partnership with Democrats on anything of note? There has been precious little of that, and the GOP has already promised less.

Boy is deluded.