“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the bastard is dead, the bitch that bore him is again in heat.” --Bertolt Brecht, "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui" ("Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui," 1941)
Washington D.C.--To be sure, this is a time to breathe a little easier, until reality sets-in. Let's be honest with ourselves and each other and acknowledge that neither Congress, President-elect Obama, nor the Supreme Court are going to do anything to prevent the Bush II administration from leaving office scot-free. Why would they want to when the Bush administration and Vice President Cheney expanded the powers of the executive branch in ways that any American politician would slaver and drool over?
Journalists can write hundreds of exposes, we can have as many smoking guns as you want, and Congress especially, will do nothing of any substance before January 20th, 2009. Nothing that gets results, that is. Nothing succeeds like failure, especially when both major parties have no real commitment to democracy beyond the fact that it gets them elected. If only it were otherwise. What's sad is that these sell-outs, these corrupt scum who are going to take us over the cliff into the abyss understand better than the public that the public is the solution to all of this.
Small wonder that they hate the public so much--who would respect anyone who does nothing in the face of such obvious and open corruption? Look at Cheney: does it appear that he cares what the public ever thought about anything-at-all? What self-respecting citizenry would tolerate this? Americans, and it's shameful. But wait, it's not as if events aren't going to shift things radically, they are and they will continue to.
Pardons are going to come into question when the Bush II cha-cha line gets going in December and January. Luckily, he's used-up a few and there are limits to how many he can hand-out. Will he give one to Stevens? Doubtful, he's not useful to anyone in the GOP now, and he's just turned 85. Stevens almost became the first American senator to be elected with a felony on his record, congratulations Alaska, you can secede. He's over, it's done, and he probably only had so much of an insider's view into the Bush II administration. Obama may not have the will to clean-up this constitutional crisis, but Pardon me, Jerry!
There are no messiahs, only this life and a lot of people avoiding responsibility for the mess we're in. It's time that we all accepted that responsibilty and stop looking to someone else to shoulder it. There is such a thing as collective-guilt, just ask the Germans some time--while they and the rest of the developed world are busy blaming us entirely for the economic crisis. Were we paying attention to our political class and pushed them hard to behave, we wouldn't be in this mess. It takes two to tango.
It took a greedy, apathetic, and jaded electorate to birth the presidency of George W. Bush. We tolerated it, and we tolerated the inaction of the other two branches of government. We still are. At least nature and the laws of physics are going to correct all of us. The soil is still very fertile for another George W. Bush and all the other kinds of scoundrel that have inhabited the highest offices in the land. We're fighting learning much from the last eight years, but events are going to correct most of this.
Just because the GOP is on the ropes doesn't mean the same problems aren't out there. They're going to bide their time when the American public loses its mind again and swings towards more self-destruction. Life's a bitch, brothers and sisters, and she's in heat again. The system just got a new face, a new mask--a brown one. The maggots, the rot, and the offal are still there behind the new facade.
[Ed., 11.19.2008--The AP is reporting that Stevens has stated he will not ask President Bush for a pardon. I think he knows he wouldn't get one.]
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