No Country for Old Rights

“Ah got all the ‘Rights’ ah needs right here.”

Whatever path they travel -- Rapture Road or Bigot Boulevard -- a huge number of wingtards not only believe that the United States will come into its ultimate destiny in some all-out, Hobbsean slaughterfest, but that this denouement is a good thing.

A righteous, Christian thing.

That with the exception of 1/2 of the 2nd Amendment, our most basic rights are as trivial and irrelevant to survival in the Mad Max future of their dearest hydroencephalic wet dreams as snuff boxes and lace cuffs.

And so an amendment drafted to allow a fledging nation to muster up a militia of smooth-bore, muzzle-loaded riflemen at a time when the graves of American killed by a hated Occupier were still fresh...is now affirmed by the Bush Family "Originalist" Court to mean that any mouthbreather with tiny penis issues can wield an arsenal that could have singlehandedly sunk the entire 18th century British Navy.

Meanwhile, right down the street, our most fundamental rights to privacy are traded away for votes like baseball cards and, under a sinister bargain struck between the leaders of the Party of Darkness and the Party of Weakness, absolution will be granted to the Peeping Telcoms before a single trial has even been held, or a single word of testimony has been taken under oath.

A crime has been committed here.

A crime against our Constitution.

A crime whose seriousness and scale dwarfs the offenses that drove Nixon to resign, and yet a crime that fades into the crowd when considered alongside all of those other acts of barbarism and betrayal that have been the hallmark of Conservative rule in America.

But rather that simply doing their fucking jobs -- to protect and defend the Constitution -- our lawmakers have decided instead to rewrite the rules to retroactively let our domestic enemies off the hook. Rather than performing their first and most sacred duty, they have decided instead to squat down and shit a big, fat, steaming load of cowardice and complicity all over the graves of every patriot who ever laid down his or her life to defend our liberties.

It is that simple.

Perhaps one could reasonably argue that grants of immunity would make sense in a Truth and Reconciliation context where, after great harm had been done to the nation by its leaders, those leaders were deposed and coaxed out of their bunkers and gated estates by a simple quid pro quo: tell the whole, unvarnished truth about what you and others did to our country -- in secret and under the color of official authority -- and we will permit you to return to the society of civil humans.

But no such bargain was struck here.

Instead of immunity being used during the course of hearings as a lever to serve the truth, it is instead being used as a lifeboat to protect traitors and obstruct their treachery from public view.

And where have we heard this all before? This nexus of propaganda, an illegal war secretly ginned up by Conservative fanatics, the invocation of national security and executive privilege to cover it up, repeated, breathtaking violations of the Constitution and the rule of law by those same ‘Murrica-luvin pig-people, and Presidential pardons all around when they all get caught with their treasonous asses hanging out?

From Time magazine:

Ollie North's Latest Laugh

Monday, Dec. 10, 1990

By Laurence I. Barrett

Though Iran-contra ranked as the most insidious scam of the mud-spattered '80s, not one of the eight convicted offenders has spent a night in jail. Last week a court ruling made it likely that the two key culprits, Oliver North and John Poindexter, would also see their records scrubbed clean in legal terms. Further, the decision may force Congress to choose between , spectacular public hearings and criminal prosecutions in future scandals.

And from a review of Independent Counsel (Remember them?) Lawrence Walsh's book on Iran/Contra:

…
For Walsh, a lifelong Republican who shared the foreign policy views of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra experience was a life-changing one, as his investigation penetrated one wall of lies only to be confronted with another and another -- and not just lies from Oliver North and his cohorts but lies from nearly every senior administration official who spoke with investigators.

…
Three years later, that immunity came back to haunt Walsh's hard-won convictions of North and Poindexter. Conservative judges on the federal appeals court, particularly Reagan loyalists Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle, exploited the immunity opening to reverse North's conviction. Sentelle, a protege of Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., also joined in the decision to wipe out Poindexter's conviction. [Since then, Sentelle has taken over the three-judge panel which selects independent counsels.]

…

The pundits, as usual, homed right in on the Important Stuff:

…
The conservative Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page fired near-daily barrages at Walsh often over trivial matters, such as first-class air fare and room-service meals. Key columnists and editorial writers for The Washington Post and The New York Times -- along with television pundits David Brinkley and Christopher Matthews -- joined in the Walsh bashings. Walsh was mocked as a modern-day Captain Ahab.

…
More seriously, the congressional and media attacks effectively limited Walsh's ability to pursue what appeared to be other false statements by senior administration officials. Those perjury inquiries could have unraveled other major national-security mysteries of the 1980s and helped correct the history of the era. But Walsh could not overcome the pack-like hostility of official Washington.

…

And, in the end, that unholy alliance of media and power, helped a Republican cabal of degenerates and True Believers who raped the shit out of Constitution make a clean getaway:

But the cover-up likely could not have worked if the other institutions of Washington -- Congress, the courts and the press -- had not helped. Those institutions aided and abetted the White House both directly, through decisions that undermined the cases or reversed convictions, or indirectly, through incessant heckling of Walsh's investigators over trivial complaints.

And, in the end, as we watched the Conservative traitors drive away in limousines, laughing at our quaint belief in the Rule of Law, we swore – we swore! – we would never let it happen again.