A Nation of Laws - Pshaw

There will be no Morialekafa on Wednesday, November 19th. I am having eye surgery.

Man loses penis and testicle
from medical misdiagnosis
in prison, settles for $300,000.

For the past eight years, and continuing on at the moment, we are less and less a nation of laws, in spite of claims to the contrary. Not only is that the case, we have been jettisoning both ethics and morality along the way. If this trend continues I fear we are not going to like the consequences.

Consider the case of Joe Lieberman Here is a Senator who claims to be a Democrat (although temporarily an Independent), and caucuses with the Democrats, but who campaigned for John McCain, the Republican candidate for President. Not only did he campaign for him, he also mounted a very negative attack on the Democratic candidate, saying things that were patently false and harmful. This was, I suppose, not immoral or illegal, but if not entirely unethical I do not know what would be. Now, with less than an abject apology, he is being allowed to maintain his powerful Chairmanship and continue on in the Senate as if nothing happened. Why is this so? Because of politics. Harry Reid and the Democrats say they they need his vote. Ethics, schmethics, It’s politics that matter.

Consider the campaign of McCain, one of the nastiest, sleaziest, destructive in history. And consider who he picked as his running mate, a woman unbelievably unqualified to be the vice-president, a slash and burn demogogue who incited her followers to near violence. This pick was an insult to the voters of this country, and as she was picked for purely political purposes, it was highly unethical, as was the campaign in general. But McCain has just met with the President-Elect and everything is now hunky-dory. It’s just politics. Obama feels he needs McCain’s support.

More importantly, consider the fact that Obama is apparently not going to try to bring charges against any of those involved in torture. Apparently they feel there are more important things to do. More important than holding accountable people who did the same things we executed Japanese for? More important than why we held the Nuremberg trials? It is true we have other important things to do, but forgiving war crimes is not something that should just be just dismissed as a nuisance. A few very low-level people were convicted and sentenced to prison for Abu Graib. It was said they were just acting on their own initiative. But isn’t it strange that these relatively unsophisticated ordinary military personnel just happened to discover the very techniques that our psychologists had determined would be the best to apply to Iraqi captives – nudity,dogs, sexual humiliation, and etc. And subsequently Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others have admitted to holding high-level meetings to discuss which techniques should be used on which prisoners. They want us to believe that “enhanced interrogation techniques” are not the same as torture. They may get away with this. So where is the rule of law?

Also consider the case of Senator Stevens of Alaska. His Senate colleagues cannot decide whether he should be expelled or not, even though he is a convicted felon. They are postponing their vote on this, hoping that he will lose his bid for re-election and they won’t have to deal with it. This is a clear-cut case of law-breaking, as well as an ethical question. The Senate apparently doesn’t care enough about the possibility of having a convicted felon among them to just come out and say no, under no circumstances, which might very well have affected the election had they done so earlier.

Of course the legal, ethical, and moral violations of Bush/Cheney and their cronies over the past eight years are so numerous and monumental to require thousands of pages, but they have not been held accountable. And whether they will ever be or not is doubtful. There is no question about their guilt. Invading a sovereign nation that was no threat to us, torture, hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, war profiteering, outing a CIA agent, illegal wiretapping, and on and on. The Democrats, following Nancy Pelosi, refused even to consider impeachment. Why? Because they felt it was politically inexpedient. So, again, politics, takes precedence over justice. These are no minor infractions that are involved, hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed or displaced, no one knows how many illegally held captive and tortured, billions of taxpayer dollars distributed to contractors for non-bid contracts and cost-plus ventures, and so on and on.

While I applaud Obama’s desire to “reach across the aisle,” I do not want him reaching across the aisle to collaborate with war criminals and obvious lawbreakers. I believe it will be a terrible mistake, and send the wrong message to the world, if he does not try to seek accountability for all these crimes and wrongdoings. This is far too important to just “let bygones be bygones.” From what I have seen and heard so far I fear this may be what is going to happen. Ethics, morality, and law just don’t seem to be important when it come to politics. Unfortunately, no society will endure for long if they throw these methods of social control out the window for the sake of politics as usual. Obama and his new Attorney General are going to have to confront this no matter where it leads.

LKBIQ:
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche

TILT:
William Clarence Eckstine (Billy Eckstine) died on March 8, 1993. He was almost 79 years old.