I like to think that I’m a pretty forgiving person. There are few things in this world that I believe are completely irredeemable, and I do not object to – in fact, I encourage – those who recognize they have done wrong to attempt to make amends for past sins.
The key word in the previous passage is “amends.” As I write this, we stand on the cusp of a new administration, a new leader and, hopefully, a new United States of America. Still, to my knowledge, there is no plan whatsoever to make any attempt to hold our previous administration responsible for what it has done.
I’m sure by now many of you reading this are rolling your eyes, thinking, “here we go again,” as I, like countless other columnists and bloggers alongside me, launch into a rant about the many crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration. Not quite. Most of us are rather well-versed in the manifold, er, accomplishments of the outgoing president and his cabinet: the torture, the lies, the wiretapping, the illegal and immoral wars, the economic recession, the incompetence, the cronyism (and, in the interest of fairness, the AIDS relief).
Yet in the face of all this, for the longest time, I had the same feeling that most people are echoing today: weariness. I was ready to just get through these last few years and let the fools go on their merry way, because good times were coming up around the bend.
But the past few days have rapidly made me change my tune. Listening to President Bush’s goodbye interviews and speeches, I was floored as he actually tried to defend the actions of his administration. Now, while I consider myself a consequentialist, the ends that Bush’s means have brought us to are not justifiable in any way, shape, or form.
Despite being responsible for the needless deaths of more than 4,000 American soldiers and authorizing actions that would land less fortunate leaders in front of an international tribunal for war crimes, they’re still going to walk out the door waving happily and wondering why they’re having to duck a hail of shoes.
Have we really slipped so far from the country we once were? I don’t think I’m stretching very far to say that what this administration has done is far worse than what Nixon did, and we were ready to impeach him – so why not Bush? The worst part is that most don’t even admit they’ve done anything wrong! After the shoe-throwing incident, Bush genuinely didn’t seem to understand “what his beef was.” The rest of his cabinet still maintain that they were not doing anything illegal, and that we are the ones who are wrong.
It’s not just Bush and Co., either. I turn on my TV and see Rob Blagojevich (accused of, among other things, shaking down a children’s hospital and selling a Senate seat) swearing in the Illinois senate. I see Bernard Madoff walking back to his penthouse apartment in the wake of his “terrible inconvenience,” as he described it, of costing hundreds of people their retirement funds, most just when they were ready to use them. Both these men should be languishing in jail for what they’ve been accused of, yet both are free to do as they please (I say free because, as Jon Stewart so excellently put it, “Madoff’s ‘house arrest’ is better than my life!”).
I understand the want to move forward from this ugly patch of our history. I’m incredibly excited about the potential our country shows as well. But that is no reason to keep allowing rich, powerful people to get away with crimes so heinous. I don’t care if Bush and his cronies meant well, didn’t realize what was going on, or any other excuse their apologists offer up. They are the leaders of our country – part of that responsibility is accepting the consequences when you do something wrong, or even ineptly.
Some may consider prosecuting the Bush administration to be the political equivalent of executing a dictator without a trial – an auspicious beginning to a new regime. But I see it a sign that things are changing, or perhaps returning, to a time where there really was no one who stood above the law.
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Move forward, prosecute Bush
Daily Emerald
January 19, 2009
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