By far, the greatest rhetorical enemy of any push to induce the Obama administration to take steps toward meaningful prosecutions is the inevitable, and most assuredly constant, depiction in the establishment media of such efforts as the silly political stirrings of "the Left." This lazy heuristic has single-handedly eviscerated innumerable attempts to correct genuine national problems and injustices, and it must be destroyed. It is one of the most effective, and despicable, techniques employed by forces of the status quo to suppress actual democratic action, in blithe disregard of the substantive merits of that action.

This reflex, this deeply damaging sleight-of-hand, must be anticipated and aggressively countered. Combining anticipation and confrontation, one effective technique is for the proponents to acknowledge and refute the inevitable tactic before it is employed, segueing immediately into the necessity of the action, and the profound ignorance and/or depravity of opposing it.

This puts control of the debate in the hands of the proponent, as opposed to his or her having to react to the dismissal of the cause as a flighty and radical attempt to impose a "leftist" agenda.

Why do you hope that?

Bush has destroyed our country and left us with a mess that will likely bankrupt us.

And you want to move on and turn the page ... ?

We need us some tumbrils.

Hauling the malefactors up to the Capitol steps is necessary, and the more dramatic, the better.

The prattlers on the teevee keep harping on the Paradigm Shift we're undergoing, what with the end of one era, the beginning of another, etc., etc., all very royalist and so on, welcoming in the New King, this Exotic from the Foreign Nation Of Hawaii (I'm sure the Hawaiians will be delighted, about dam time they got their sovereignty back), and all the New Ideas, New Ways, New New Deals we're gonna get.

Something completely different.

Of course, given the Paradigm Shift underway, the idea of reaching back into the past to account for this or that mistake would be... too... rude.

Yet still, tumbrils would add so much...

Bush will be gone Jan 20th. I hope Glenn can move on and find something new to discuss.

Although it's been fun chatting about our torture practices & hypocrisy all, let's not forget that this is the time when we ceremonially celebrate the completion of another Earth rotation around the Sun.

Here's hoping the next trip will be better.

It's possible all this is merely coincidence, but it does sort of make you wonder - knowing all we know now about the neo-cons and their former objectives which have now all been brought to light.

I know nothing of The Jones Report, but he has cross referenced EVERY SINGLE point with legitimate sources from US Dept of Defense web page to MSNBC, etc.

Please read and let me know what you think. You can click into my signature for the link and listen to Wolfowitz giving a speech on June 1, 2001 to a West Point Commencement:

http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/070207_wolfowitz.html

Is there a program we don't know about to maintain the silence and the drumbeat against prosecution? Wouldn't it take an investigation to find out? On other things, it's turned out to be more than just selfish corporate interests that supressed the truth. Is it so in this case too?

Here's the thing. I know lots of fair-minded people, liberal people, who are opposed to prosecution on the (wrongheaded) grounds that it would distract the country too much in a time of economic need, or would unduly "dwell on the past." This tells me that it does not take a concerted effort between government and corporate America to suppress the call for prosecutions of Bush administration officials for their various crimes.

That's not to say I think there's no possibility of some degree of collusion in the mold of the Pentagon/media media consultants scandal, but I do think it's less clear-cut here. I think the primary motivation - obviously without being able to know for sure - is the basic self-interest of our major media players and Democratic politicians to avoid their own complicity in these crimes. Because so many acceded or condoned these things when they were happening or first became known, there exists a critical mass of people eager to "turn the page" and paper over what happened with the avoidance of truthful language and use of euphemisms like "harsh interrogation techniques."

Let's hope a larger segment of the population and the intelligentsia have the nerve to speak out forcefully next time. I won't hold my breath. I hate to sound glib, but my fear is that we'll be too busy focusing on some celebrity's breakup or the sex scandal du jour to bother with such trivialities as political and moral self-correction. Even that may be too generous. Perhaps instead we'll again be driven by the same blinding bloodlust and xenophobia that got us into the current mess.

The Bush-Cheney gang remind me of the years I spent as a peace officer in security with the California State Department of Corrections. A guy was incarcerated for molesting a little girl. Why did you kill her, he was asked. "I had to. She wouldn't stop screaming." And the little dog? "I had to. It wouldn't stop chasing me and barking." See? He had to kill them. It wasn't his fault.

Are the members of the Bush-Cheney gang insane or sociopathic? Does it reall matter which?

Kohlberg's stages of moral development, adapted for the Bush administration:

In Stage one (obedience and punishment driven), individuals focus on the direct consequences that their actions will have for themselves. For example, an action is perceived as morally wrong if the person who commits it gets punished. "the last time I [committed a war crime] I got [prosecuted] so I will not do it again" The worse the punishment for the act is, the more 'bad' the act is perceived to be.

No punishment means that the act wasn't "wrong". To the contrary, having committed an act that was criticized as being wrong and gotten away it without punishment, it would be edifying to the perpetrator. With a long list of avoiding any consequences for bad behavior, at least as it would be judged for most others, Bush (and many in his administration) have learned that getting away with it is 10 tenths of the law.

This can give rise to an inference that even innocent victims are guilty in proportion to their suffering. In addition, there is no recognition that others' points of view are any different from one's own view. This stage may be viewed as a kind of authoritarianism.

This interpretation certainly seems to fit the patterns of "thinking" Bush, and others, applied to the non-combatants and civilian casualties from the war on terror.

Hypocrisy is a predictable, and indeed logical, consequence of these stages of moral reasoning. Since the mainstream media has abandoned the role of challenging power, it seems fitting that the watchdog of democracy has enabled the wanton brazenness of the extreme right that has manifest in blatant crimes it condemns in others.

The domestic challenges currently facing the United States seem to me so daunting that I fear there will be little in the way of resolve to tackle the moral rot of most of the political class, the corruption of most of the political system and the prosecution of the many Democrats and Republicans who are responsible for these egregious crimes. Should they be swept under the table, as Sunstein and Marcus advocate, I wonder if there will be a guilty acknowledgment of what has passed and a subsequent maturation of American politics, or if it will not further encourage and fuel the extreme right to continue wrecking a great nation.