Kudos to the New York Times for having the stones to recommend that Dick Cheney and other officials of the administration of George W. Bush, should be prosecuted for war crimes. Of course they should. The feds should also throw a dozen or so big bankers in jail for committing fraud and crashing the economy in 2008. But they haven’t and they won’t. And nobody is going to prosecute Dick Cheney, and the editorial writers at the Times know it.
The big guys at the top almost always take care of one another. In big business, how many of the CEO’s who have crashed big companies and then bailed out with golden parachutes have been prosecuted? It’s endemic in our society and the same holds true for politics. Ford, pardoned Richard Nixon, the Reagan Administration was never held accountable for prolonging the release of the American hostages in Iran in 1981, and and Mr. Obama, won’t condone a criminal prosecution of Dick Cheney. If he did, a special prosecutor appointed by his new attorney general might have to haul a former president into court to testify. There’s a precedent no sitting president wants to set.
Beyond that, can you even imagine the uproar from the right, claiming any prosecution of poor Dick Cheney and his inner circle was purely political? Whitewater, Benghazi, Vince Foster and Monica Lewinsky combined don’t even being to touch it.
Being able to commit and benefit from horrendous acts, either economically or politically, and then walking away without reasonable accountability, may be at the heart of all that ails us as a people.
That doesn’t mean that putting the proposition out there has no value. Not being able to act on the truth doesn’t mean we should deny it. Denial, only makes matters worse by implying our tacit approval. Like looking the other way while the Reagonites cut their deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until Reagan had been sworn in back in 1981, or when Nixon’s gang of political thugs torpedoed the peace process in Vietnam to defeat Hubert Humphrey in 1968 .
Most Americans never even think about these things. Denial, is so much easier.