Death Squads, Cheney, and American Standards

The Rude Pundit. I am leaving out his first paragraph because it will make you seriously consider not eating lunch.

The point here is that, right now, with just a little revealed and a more-than-likely horrible lot more waiting in the shadows like Orson Welles in The Third Man, it seems that Dick Cheney was, at the very least, concocting with the CIA a plan for a secret assassination army. Surely, we'll hear soon about how many terrorists were killed by crack shots, their heads brought to Cheney so he could use them for a delicious freedom stew, keeping the skulls as trophies until he had enough to construct a throne of bone. And, really, and, c'mon, what would be surprising would be to find out that Dick Cheney wasn't constructing a skull chair.

Yet, bizarrely, some Republicans are saying there shouldn't be an investigation into the potential that the CIA was putting together a death squad and that the Vice President told the CIA to lie to Congress about it. It's as if they're throwing up their hands in a comical "what can you do?" gesture, as if they're saying, "Well, that's just Cheney," and a laugh track will play to cover their asses.

While it's screamingly frustrating to keep saying, "But...but...if Clinton..." and just sigh, Republicans set the bar lower than a snail turd as to what's a scandal worth having investigated. Fucking "Travelgate"...

There's your scales of Republican justice: travel office employees fired? It's a crisis that demands millions of dollars spent to discover nothing. Potential secret CIA death squads and the involvement of at least the Vice President in lying to Congress in violation of the law? Nah, why bother? Let's move forward, not look back.

Yet the very nature of investigation and criminal proceedings is to look backward, with the knowledge that the past very much impacts the present. If Attorney General Eric Holder does go forward with a probe of Bush-era torture policies and if Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats are serious about looking into the CIA/Cheney story, then we will be making baby steps back to being a nation that actually gives a flying rat's fuck about the laws we pass.

And if we don't look back, if we simply attempt to bury the past in our inexorable march forward with the knowledge that unpunished crimes have been committed, then we, all of us, become co-conspirators. We all carry that burden then, that we know we are a country that has done wrong, but we are unwilling to prove it and punish those who ordered the commission of crimes in our name.

Amen.