|
there haven't been a whole lot of examples like that of the bush administration.
watergate was a shitty, stupid obviously criminal side-action. the other one was a partisan witch-hunt over what i personally regard as a non-issue. either way, what they have in common is that each involves an isolated or isolatable action and that each is to the side of the actual doings of the the president. so neither is about a philosophy of executive power. both are just stupid.
the american system seems set up to address stupid side things, but doesn't seem capable of addressing either clear violations of law national and international that flow from policy positions (guantanomo) and even less violations that are clearly problematic but which may not involve an existing law---for example there may not be an explicit law that says "thou shalt not make up the grounds for a war"
there's obviously a political problem---a shitload of them---that accompany making up the grounds for war when it becomes obvious that those grounds are made up---but in the case of the bush people, alot of those problems seemed to follow from the "free" press collectively waking up and realizing that they'd not only been sold a pile of shit by the administration but worse that they'd actively-to-enthusiastically repeated that pile of shit to the point of endangering their own political credibility (political here in a broad sense)...so you could see the consequences of the bush people's actions having been so far limited to their being thrown under the bus by regions of the nation press for reasons that had everything to do with the interests of the national press and nothing at all to do with redress for doing things like
making up the grounds for a war and
systematically misleading the american public
and
that sort of thing
and it may be that the outcome of an investigation would be a new set of hedges placed around executive power at the statutory level--but the bush people couldn't themselves be prosecuted under law that their actions may have more or less caused to be written.
so it's a problem. it's particularly an issue for a centrist like obama who seems to have thought that prosecution would alienate the right when his tactical inclinations were to work with/co-opt the right. but that seems to have only provided the right space to drift further into dissociative ultra-right/neo-fascist spaces, at least at the populist level, the level that relies on affinities with fox news to get an inordinate amount of press coverage.
at the same time, i think the actions of the bush people require some kind of response...some kind of investigation, some kind of action even if it would be complicated to pull off to what i would regard as a successful conclusion. system legitimacy requires it. but i doubt it'll happen. and the system will bear the consequences of the erosion that this will engender in its legitimacy.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|