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Banned
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Originally Posted by Telluride
I agree. Every so often I'll hear somebody complaining about how bad one party is and that things will be so much better if/when the other party comes into power...and it really bugs me. Both parties have done their fair share of immoral and abusive shit, so I see no reason why I should like or trust either one.
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Telluride, don't you think that you do yourself a disservice by posting (believing ????) such a simplistic dismissal of "both parties"? Can it really be that simple? I doubt it....
Anyone who wanted to, could have challenged this recent TFP Politics thread's title.....the challenges weren't very supportive of your argument:
<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=116612">
So Tired of the "It's Both Parties" Denial/Dismissal</a>
....please read the following Glenn Greenwald excerpt, and then share with us, what he has wrong in his articulate opinion that is so totally opposite your "it's both parties", POV?
If he and I are incorrect. shouldn't it be only a small challenge for you to write something convincingly rebutting Greenwald's points...or the points in the "It's Both Parties" thread, linked above?
Simple, unsupported dismissals of "both parties", don't cut it here, Telluride.... they're not competitive, compared to the posted record here...unless you can show us otherwise...and they're not practical. Leahy, in the senate, and Waxman and Conyers, in the house, have held power for less than six months. They have demonstrably exercised more methodical practice of checks and balances in that time, than the previous congress performed in six years....
You do them...and us....a disservice by your dismissive opinion...and, from what Greenwald describes below, your POV is neither fair or accurate, IMO:
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...bby/index.html
....That Dick Cheney's top aide, one of the most well-connected neoconservatives on the planet, is protected from the consequences of his felonies ought to be anything but surprising. That is the country that we have. It is a result that is completely consistent with the "values" that define official Washington. No other outcome was possible.
The Plame investigation was urged by the Bush CIA and commenced by the Bush DOJ, Libby's conviction pursued by a Bush-appointed federal prosecutor, his jail sentence imposed by a Bush-appointed "tough-on-crime" federal judge, all <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTIzNzRhMGY5NGI0MGFkYzlmMDFmZTI3OTE5NmRiZTc=">pursuant to</a> harsh and merciless criminal laws <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/man-like-this-by-digby-i-dont-know.html">urged on</a> by the "tough-on-crime/no-mercy" GOP. Lewis Libby was sent to prison by the system constructed and desired by the very Republican movement protesting his plight.....
...... But the most significant disease highlighted by the Libby travesty is also the most obvious one. We have decided to be a country in which our highest Republican political officials can break the law freely, without any real consequence. In the United States, the law does not apply to the President and his closest aides. And there is one fact after the next which proves that.
Almost thirty years ago, the American people reacted with fury and horror over revelations by the Church Committee that every administration in prior decades had been spying on Americans for completely improper purposes. In response, they enacted a law, through their Congress, <b>making it a felony for any government official to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial approval, punishable by 5 years in prison for each offense.</b> Since 1977, it has been a felony in the United States for political officials to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial warrants.
But in December of 2005, The New York Times revealed that George Bush had been breaking this law -- committing felonies -- every day for the prior four years. And when he was caught, he went on television and proudly admitted what he had done and <b>vowed defiantly to continue doing it</b>. And our wise and serious Washington media establishment shrugged, even applauded. They directed their fury only at those who objected to the lawbreaking. The GOP-controlled Congress blocked every attempt to investigate this criminality -- with virtually no outcry -- and then set out to pass a new law making this criminality retroactively legal. In response to revelations that the President was deliberately breaking the law, official Washington fell all over itself figuring out the most efficient way to protect and defend the President's crimes.
Ever since Gerald Ford, with the support of our permanent Beltway ruling class, pardoned Richard Nixon for his crimes -- followed naturally by the current President's father shielding his own friends and aides from the consequences of serious criminal convictions for lying to Congress and deliberately breaking its laws, with <a href="http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/969">one of those criminals</a> then appointed with no objection by his son to run Middle East policy from the White House -- we have been a nation which allows our highest political officials to reside beyond the reach of law. It is just that simple.
And over the last six years, that "principle" has been extended to its most extreme though logical conclusions. This administration expressly adopted theories -- right out in the open -- which, as it its <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/01/ideology-of-lawlessness.html">central premise</a>, states that the President is greater than the law, that his "obligation" to protect the nation means that nothing and nobody can limit what he does, including -- especially -- the laws enacted by our Congress, no matter how radical and extreme that conduct is.
In response to this most audacious declaration of Presidential Omnipotence, our Sober Guardians of Political Wisdom shrugged. Those who objected too strenuously, who used terms such as "criminal" and "lawlessness" or who raised the specter of impeachment -- the tool created by the Founders to redress executive lawbreaking -- were branded as radicals or impetuous, unserious partisan hysterics. The only crime recognized by official Washington is using impetuous or excessively irreverent language to object to the lawbreaking and radicalism of the Leader, or acting too aggressively to investigate it. That is the only crime that triggers their outrage.
Even with an overarching Ideology of Lawlessness explicitly embraced by their President right in front of their faces -- an ideology used to torture people, to detain people in "law-free" dungeons around the world, even to abduct our fellow citizens on U.S. soil and put them into a black hole for years without any charges or even contact with the outside world -- our political establishment stood by him, supported him, insisting that he and his Vice President were serious, responsible men acting under difficult circumstances to protect us, and that the only ones deserving of true scorn were those who were overzealous in their criticisms of the Leaders.
The President and his followers know that they can apply completely different rules to themselves, and freely break the law, because our Washington establishment, our "political press," will never object too strenuously, or even at all. Over the last six years, our media has directed their hostility <b>only towards those who investigate or attempt to hold accountable</b> the most powerful members of our political system -- <h2>hence their attacks on the GOP prosecutor investigating the Bush administration's crimes</h2>, their anger towards the very few <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-silverstein30jun30,0,1939913.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail">investigative reporters</a> trying to uncover Washington's secrets, and their <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/26/matthews/index.html">righteous condemnation</a> towards each of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401752.html">handful of attempts</a> by Congress to exercise investigative oversight of the administration.
The political press -- the function of which was envisioned by the Founders to investigate and hold accountable the most politically powerful -- now fulfill the exact oppose purpose in our country. They are slavishly protective of our highest political officials, and adversarial only to those who investigate, oppose and seek to hold those officials accountable. Hence, in official Washington, the Real Villains are Patrick Fitzgerald, Ken Silverstein, Russ Feingold and his Censure resolution, Pat Leahy and his disruptive subpoenas -- our Beltway elite reserves their venom for those who want to <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/19/cohen/index.html">turn the lights on</a> what our most powerful political officials are doing.
What kind of country do we expect to have when we have a ruling Washington class that believes that they and their fellow members of the Beltway elite constitute a separate class, one that resides above and beyond the law? That is plainly what they believe. And we now have exactly the country that one would expect would emerge from a political culture shaped by such a deeply insulated, corrupt and barren royal court.
In <a href="http://www.thisnation.com/library/books/federalist/70.html">Federalist No. 70</a>, Alexander Hamilton described the defining power of the King which made the British monarchy intolerably corrupt: "In England, the king is a perpetual magistrate; and it is a maxim which has obtained for the sake of the public peace, that <b>he is unaccountable for his administration, and his person sacred."</b> Thomas Paine proclaimed in Common Sense "that so far as we approve of monarch, that in America THE LAW IS KING." But little effort is required to see how far removed we now are from those basic principles.
It it no surprise that we have political leaders who are corrupt and abuse their power. Our whole political system is premised on the expectation that this will happen. But that expectation was accompanied by the attempt by the Founders to create as many safeguards and checks on those abuses as possible. Over the last six years, all of those safeguards have failed completely.
We have a radical and lawless government that has run rampant over the last six years precisely because the institutions designed to stop that abuse have not only stood idly by, but have actively defended and participated in it. We actually have a press corps that holds, as its central belief, <b>that our highest government officials should be free of investigation and accountability</b>. In every country ruled by a lawless government and a corrupt political and media elite, powerful political officials do not go to prison for crimes. That is why convicted felon Lewis Libby will remain free....
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