Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Will we ever prosecute People Like That when they have robbed and murdered People Like Us?

We just won't go where that leads. It's hard to even talk about impeaching the President much less prosecuting him and his co-conspirators for aggravated murder and racketeering. I think the idea that such a thing should be done stuns us.

These are very real crimes committed for very ordinary reasons of power and profit differing only in terms of scale from ordinary muggings and murders. What bothers is that we are supposed to have a society and culture that precludes people like that gaining a position such as this.

Vincent Bugliosi: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder - Politics on The Huffington Post:

"In a November 15, 2005, editorial, the New York Times said that 'the president and his top advisers . . . did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections.' But if it's 'obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans' in taking them to a war that tens of thousands of people have paid for with their lives, now what? No punishment? If not, under what theory? Again, you're just going to go on to the next paragraph?

I'm not going to go on to the next unrelated paragraph."

If Bush, in fact, intentionally misled this nation into war, what is the proper punishment for him? Since many Americans routinely want criminal defendants to be executed for murdering only one person, if we weren't speaking of the president of the United States as the defendant here, to discuss anything less than the death penalty for someone responsible for over 100,000 deaths would on its face seem ludicrous. But we are dealing with the president of the United States here.

On the other hand, the intensity of rage against Bush in America has been such (it never came remotely this close with Clinton because, at bottom, there was nothing of any real substance to have any serious rage against him for) that if I heard it once I heard it ten times that "someone should put a bullet in his head." That, fortunately, is just loose talk, and even more fortunately not the way we do things in America. In any event, if an American jury were to find Bush guilty of first degree murder, it would be up to them to decide what the appropriate punishment should be, one of their options being the imposition of the death penalty.


I'm going to write MY next paragraph here.

What allowed such a confederation of murderous dunces to gain power? Who gains most from this climate of fear and the terror of black helicopters and fluoridated water supplies? What particular groups seek influence over not merely our spiritual health, but our material wealth and the ways we choose to spend it?

Yes, I've said it before and I've said it again, the unholy alliance between the Religious Right (Dominionists and Prosperity Gospel types) and the political right has created a toxic karmic waste dump. The likely outcome in the immediate short term is likely the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but it may also lead to the end of the Religious Right as people see these scandals unravel to reveal major secular and religious "wingers" having had unholy congress with one another for profit.

When people seek out a moral example to follow, only to find that those teachings either lead directly to personal pain and loss or that the leadership does the exact opposite themselves, it's only reasonable to expect the flock to scatter. No moral compass is better than the assuredly wrong one.

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