Elect

Josh – 2008-11-04 17:56

I’m excited, I’m proud of my country, I’m happy to be an American.

For President Obama, I hope simply that he’ll be a good man. That difference from our current appointed President alone will be enough to mark this as the moment we awoke from an eight-year nightmare.

For George W. Bush, no time of departure can take him from us soon enough, and there is no punishment on earth or in hell fit for his crimes. Even Jesus would never forgive what you do.

A failure to prosecute Bush and Cheney for their theft of the office, and the war crimes they committed while wrongfully installed there, will spell the repetition of those crimes. While our electoral system has swung back into relevance by choosing President Obama to tend the future, it will require the concerted effort of a restored legal apparatus to cleanse the awful past, and to punish those responsible. Making the choice to pursue this seriously, assiduously, and as fairly as the trials at Nuremberg, with, one can only hope, the same outcome, is a choice every bit as important as the one we made tonight.

1 Comment on Elect

  1. Commenting on my own post so this isn’t forgotten, and because I’ve had a couple people ask me, sneering at my ‘shrillness’: “Just what were these ‘war crimes’?”

    From Glen Greenwald:

    Just consider — with no hyperbole — what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons — “black site” gulags — beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they’d be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of “war crimes”.

    I’m an American. I bear a part of the responsibility for that record, for letting it happen in my country. I’m sorry for it, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that it keeps me up nights.

    Prosecution and punishment of those directly responsible is the only hope to start dissolving the stain of Cheney.

    Josh - 2008-11-11 12:19

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