6 posts tagged “rule of law”

Who was it who said, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice..."?

There's no doubt that the incoming administration has its plate more than full with a whole spectrum of disasters.  But there is some unfinished business that we can't allow to slip into the memory hole.  Over the past eight years untold numbers of people within the U.S. Government have committed crimes of an epic nature.  As Ian Welsh at Firedoglake points out:

The SAME people who were responsible for Nixons' crimes, were responsible for Iran/Contra. They and their proteges came back and were responsible for Bush, Iraq, torture, screwing up Katrina and so on.

But we're supposed to let bygones be bygones so they can do it again in the next Republican administration.

If these crimes are allowed to go unpunished, the rule of law will be seriously damaged.  This is not about revenge; it's about justice.  A desire to "let bygones be bygones" is misguided in an insidious way.  That's not bringing us together.  That's letting people get away with murder.

The overwhelming majority of Americans, as well as people around the world, have positive views of President-elect Obama, and hope has lifted us.  Unfortunately, there are those who are consumed by hate who would destroy the very foundations of our country.  No, I'm not talking about al Qaeda. I'm talking about people who would promote this kind of behavior in their children (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

Whoolery and his wife couldn't believe it when their second and third graders got off the bus last week and told them what other students were saying.

"They just hadn't heard anything like this before," said Whoolery. "They were chanting on the bus, 'Assassinate Obama. Assassinate Obama.' Then adding in a name sometimes of a classmate on the bus, 'Assassinate Obama and Kate.'"

The Whoolery's explained to their kids what assassinate means then contacted the school about what was happening.

This is not funny.  It's not harmless. It's irresponsible at best, and traitorous at worst. For those who may have forgotten or be too young to remember, before the attacks of 9/11 the worst terrorist attack on American soil was carried out, not by scary brown people, but by these guys:

That's right, good "patriotic" white males.  People who allow their delusions, stoked by zealots and talk show hosts, to run wild can cause catastrophic damage.  The tragedy is only increased by the fact that the "enemy" they feel compelled to fight against exists only in their minds.

Those of us who lived through the turbulence of the 1960s still remember the horror and disbelief of seeing three of our great leaders, John, Martin and Bobby, murdered.  Whether it's the lone madman or an organized group, there's no way to completely protect ourselves from such people.  That is part of the cost of living in a free society.  There is simply no such thing as complete security — unless you're locked in a padded cell.  But that realization doesn't preclude us from making every effort to eliminate such behavior by marginalizing it to the point that it gets into the "being struck by a falling meteorite" range.

To think that people would teach their children to chant words like "assassinate" while thinking of themselves as "righteous" and "patriotic" is just sick.  It's up to every one of us to resist this kind of talk, whether it comes in a forwarded email or a casual conversation.  It is a cancer in the soul of humanity, and every individual has a responsibility to do what they can to stop it wherever it tries to spread.

It's not funny.  It's not patriotic.  It must stop.

One point made by General Colin Powell in his endorsement of Barack Obama for president deserves more discussion (hat tip to Glenn Greenwald):

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as:  "Well,  you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim."  Well, the correct answer is:   he is not a Muslim.  He's a Christian.   He's always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is:  What if he is?  Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?  The answer is:  No, that's not America.  Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion:  he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists.  This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Powell related a story about a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. His name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Muslim-American.  Greenwald points out:

There has been much condemnation over the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false as applied to the Christian Obama, not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true.

"Arab" and "Muslim" have become so synonymous with "terrorist" in much of the discourse in America that it's hard for some to believe that their are many, many American Muslims, and they are just as American as the Christians, Jews, Mormons, et al.  Again, from Glenn Greenwald:

When John McCain, at that rally in Minnesota last week, sought to chide his supporter for asserting that Obama is an "Arab," McCain did so by pointing out that, in fact, Obama is a "decent family man" -- as though that proves that he's not "an Arab because "decent family man" is the opposite of "Arab"

For those who may have forgotten, the founders of of the United States of America wanted it to be absolutely clear and unambiguous that there was NO state religion here.  For example, Article VI of the U.S. Constitution states:

...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

And there is the "Establishment Clause" of the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [emphasis added]

So if you claim to be a patriotic American, especially a "strict constructionist,"  you must acknowledge that people of every faith — or no faith — have equal status under the laws of our country.  This is what makes freedom of religion possible.

There are few, if any, things one can do to undermine democracy that would be worse than denying citizens the right to vote.  And yet this is precisely what the Republican Party is trying to do.  They figure, if you can't win an election fairly, then steal it.  This is something they cannot be allowed to get away with.  All this shrieking and hand-wringing from Republicans about ACORN and illegal aliens committing voter fraud is ... well, trying to keep my PG rating, I'll say, balderdash.

As I've mentioned before, this is the very issue at the heart of the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, which has yet to be fully resolved.  One of the USAs fired, David Iglesias of New Mexico, described it this way:

"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."

The Obama campaign has responded to this latest round of voter fraud accusations:

"With this voter fraud [investigation], we're seeing an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bob Bauer, an elections lawyer with the Obama camp, said on a conference call with reporters just now. Bauer compared the decision to launch the investigation with the US attorneys scandal, in which several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration.

Bauer released a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling on him to have the issue taken on by Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor he appointed to investigate the US attorney firings.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also weighed in on the Republican efforts to suppress the vote in Ohio:

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s order requiring state officials in Ohio to supply information that would have made it easier to challenge prospective voters. The decision was a setback for Ohio Republicans, who had sued to force the Ohio secretary of state, a Democrat, to provide information about database mismatches to county officials.

The fact is that the whole voter fraud scare is nothing but smoke and mirrors.  It makes no sense if you think about it logically, but of course the Republican Party operatives who promote this are counting on people not thinking about it at all, but simply reacting emotionally to it.  Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article in Slate on the issue, in which she says:

Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen. The incentives—unlike the incentives for registration fraud—just aren't there. In an interview this week with Salon, Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College, who has studied vote fraud systematically, noted that "between 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty others were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five were guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters." Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired for searching high and low for vote-fraud cases to prosecute and coming up empty. Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that five days before the 2006 election, then-interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman exuberantly (and futilely) indicted four ACORN workers, even when Justice Department policy barred such prosecutions in the days before elections. RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has said he is unaware of a single improper vote cast because of bad cards submitted in the course of a voter-registration effort. Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset says, "[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"

That doesn't stop the McCain-Palin campaign from trying to use ACORN as a boogeyman to whip up anger on the right.  Plus, it goes hand in hand with their demonization of illegal aliens.  Anonymous Liberal puts it in perspective:

Some suggest that this willing army of criminals might be recruited from the ranks of illegal aliens or unnaturalized citizens, people who are not eligible to vote. That's nonsense. Illegal aliens live in constant fear of being discovered and deported. Good luck getting an illegal alien to submit a registration form much less actually go to a polling station. And legal residents have very similar fears. Voter fraud is a deportable offense. These folks value their immigration status more than anything in the world and would never risk it in order to cast a vote.

And now the right-wing fringe is acting on the provocation from McCain and Palin by threatening and vandelizing ACORN offices.  These kinds of tactics deserve to wind up on the trash heap of history.  There's nothing honorable or American about it.

TPMMuckraker has an analysis of the new report on the White House involvement in the firing of the U.S. Attorneys.  Here's a sample:

The White House's active involvement in the firings, as depicted in the report, can be divided into two broad categories: First, its role in initiating and promoting the overall plan to remove an unspecified number of U.S. attorneys -- traditionally treated as apolitical prosecutors who operate independently from the political agenda of the administration -- deemed insufficiently committed to the Bush agenda. And second, its apparent work in pushing specifically for several of the most high-profile dismissals.

This story got lost in all the bad economic news and the presidential campaign.  The politicization and perversion of the Justice Department that has taken place under the Bush/Cheney administration must be reversed.  And that's going to involve some prosecutions.

Okay, I know to a lot of people college professors are right there with "elitists" and "Liberals" as the root of all evil, but I personally think it would be nice to have someone who is smarter than me as president for a change.  One of Obama's greatest strengths is the ability to explain complex issues in terms that most anyone can grasp.  If all the outrage from civil libertarians about the Bush-Cheney administration's gutting of Habeas Corpus, that principle that's been around since the Magna Carta had your eyes glazing over, check out this brief excerpt from Obama about the importance of Habeas Corpus to ordinary people (via conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan):

    Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"
    The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, "because we don't always have the right person."
    "We don't always catch the right person," he said. "We may think it's Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it's Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president."
[...]
"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting," Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. "Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years."