Accountability

 

"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who worked in the Trump administration. Like, I want to live in a world where, 25 years from now, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume because they don't want to put they were part of the Trump administration on their resume." -- Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

What a noble sentiment!  Would that we lived in a world where people who uncritically served and cheered on a corrupt and criminally incompetent administration that left disaster after disaster in its wake would end up feeling really, really bad about it.  So deeply ashamed that it would affect their employability.  

Sigh.

Hey, how about, just for goofs, instead of looking forward 25 years to a utopian future where feeling shame about serving and cheering on a corrupt and criminally incompetent administration had, y'know, consequences -- 

-- let's look back 25 years and see how this noble sentiment played out in the real world during what our Never Trumper friends would have you believe were the good old days of rectitude and personal responsibility. 

So, the year 2025 - 25 gives us...hey!  2000!

You might remember that was the year a Republican mob disrupted vote counting in Florida.  The year that five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices anointed George W. Bush president of the United States.

After that came Bush's catastrophic failure on 9/11.  Then lying us into the wrong war.  Then fucking that war up -- the worst foreign policy debacle in modern history, but enriched the vice president's cronies and former business partners.  Pissing away the Clinton surplus and saddling us with even bigger deficits than Reagan and Bush I combined.  Then came Hurricane Katrina.  Teri Schiavo.  The failed attempt to privative Social Security.  The attorney general scandal.  Then the collapse of the world economy.  And so many more!

So, if we rejigger Ms. Longwell's words just a little bit...

"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who worked in the George W. Bush administration. Like, I want to live in a world where, 25 years later, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume because they don't want to put they were part of the Dubya administration on their resume." -- driftglass.

But that didn't happen, did it?   

You will remember that, having been in office barely a minute and in response to a reporter's question about the arrest of his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in 2009 for disorderly conduct outside of his own home, Barack Obama made this offhand but truthful remark:

"I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say... that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home." 

You’d have thought that he had publicly wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights.  A president of the United States had the temerity to say, out loud, that some cops acted stupidly!  Massive blowback.  Massive outcry.  

Fun historical fact: eight years later,  the same people who pretended to faint in outraged droves over this would go on to elect elect a racist internet troll and adjudicated rapist who calls anyone who disagrees with him even slightly "stupid" and "terrible" and "weak" and "the enemy of the people" and "terrorists" and worse, on and on and on and on and on, every fucking day.

Anyway, hence, the so-called beer summit.

But when it came the actual war crimes committed by the Bush administration, the legacy media and Conservative media and Republican politicians all locked arms and decided on a strategy of purposeful ignorance.

From Eric Alterman in The Nation, May 6, 2009:

Even after the disgraceful performance of so many armchair warriors during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, who would have dared predict the willingness, nay, eagerness, of respected journalists and pundits to argue in favor of purposeful ignorance? Sadly, many of them have shown less interest in potential war crimes committed by the Bush administration than little Misha Lerner, the Jewish Primary Day School fourth grader who quizzed Condoleezza Rice about her inability to explain the legality of these policies to a group of Stanford students.

While many have made the case to varying degrees, Peggy Noonan made it most explicitly: “Some things in life need to be mysterious,” she said of America’s role in torturing terrorist suspects. “Sometimes you need to just keep walking.” 

This is the full Noonan quote:

 "Some things in life need to be mysterious.  Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that." 

Go down the list of every war criminal in the Bush administration and you will find none – zero – who ever paid any price for any of the atrocities they committed.

In fact, this was the mastermind of the Iraq debacle back in 2014 at a Politico event.

Go down the list of the most prominent Bush administration cheerleaders and torture enthusiasts and what do you find?

You find that none of them ever apologized.  None were ever chastised.  None were shamed out of their media gigs.  None of them ever missed a meal.

Instead, you find some of them, like Nicolle Wallace and Joe Scarborough, hosting shows on MSNBC, Wallace glossing over the entire Bush Administration with the phrase, “My former boss whatever you think of him”.  You find them with op-ed columns in The New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic.

You find the scumbag who cooked up the absurd legal predicate for the Bush administration's torture regime, John Yoo, is now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. 

You find Spit-Comb Paul Wolfowitz being appointed the president of the World Bank, a job he had to quit two years later only because of an unrelated sex scandal.

All the Fox News degenerates who led the scorched earth slander campaign against the anti-war movement all still have jobs, and before he died and went to hell, Donald Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  

So, Sarah Longwell, this is exactly how we got to where we are.  Rules and consequences.  Your party’s rules and your party's consequences, going back decades.

Republicans spent an enormous amount of time and effort teaching generations of Republican voters one, basic rule:  that, no matter how ignorant and bigoted and wrong they acted, it was their God-given right to never be held responsible for anything.  To never feel shame for being dead-rat stupid.  To revel in being vicious and cruel.   

And the consequences?  You can see those all around you every day.

You taught Conservative media and Republican politicians that the key to success was flattering and appeasing the mob.  

You taught them, the louder the demagogue and the bloodier the lie, the more the morons would cheer.

I Am The Liberal Media