Shut it up
Andrew Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow all took Karl Rove to task for this stupidity. I might as well join in! Let’s break it down like En Vogue:
What the Obama administration’s done in the last several days is very dangerous.
What they’ve essentially said is, if we have policy disagreements with our predecessors,
what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses . . .
Hey Karl, you know what else is popular among South American dictators? Torture. They LOVE the stuff.
. . . and what we’re gonna do, is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.
Policy differences? Really? Not, you know, criminal acts?
Is that what we’ve come to in this country? That if we have a change of administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements with-that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that’s run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that’s not the way we do things here in America.
You know what, Karl? Your mom’s a junta. (I should probably look that word up.)
Ignoring for the moment that I think Chicago is technically located within the borders of the United States, Mr. Rove apparently thinks that the matter of torture, which is against federal law and various international treaties, is merely a “policy disagreement,” like arguments over tax rates or deficit spending.
Hey Karl: shut the hell up. You’re a buffoon. What we’re talking about are crimes. Crimes that hopefully will be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Shepard Smith put it best (warning: uncensored F-bomb, if that bothers you).
It’s all Gerald Ford’s fault, I think. When he infamously pardoned Richard Nixon, he set a dangerous precedent that a Presidential administration should not pass judgment on the crimes of a previous one. Which is fine, if we were some kind of banana republic in which every new dictator spends the first week slaughtering everyone associated with the last one. I can’t remember any incoming President immediately telling the Department of Justice to go after the last guy because he didn’t like him. What would the benefit be? It’s not as if last guy is going to come back. The time of Grover Cleveland is gone, people.
By “closing the book” on the Watergate scandal, President Ford gave credence to President Nixon’s idea that when the President does something, it’s not illegal. Since we didn’t punish Nixon, now we can’t punish anyone, seems to be the feeling.
My ass. Mr. Holder, the only way to prevent these kind of crimes from happening again are to ensure that everyone knows they’ll be punished for it. As much as I hate the idea of “setting an example,” anyone who authorized or ordered torture tactics needs to be prosecuted and jailed. Go get ’em.
I do have to admit, however, that my judgment may be clouded by the fact that I’m giddy over the possibility that Dick Cheney might end up with a prison tattoo saying “If u reed dis, bubba kill u.”
