Protecting Their Own
by digby
Last week-end I wrote a long and I'm sure mostly unread post about uber-villager Stuart Taylor and his crusade to ensure that the Bush administration's unitary executive torture regime goes unpunished. I talked about how Taylor was a major player in the Clinton scandals who believed that it was a serious breach of law and ethics for the president to lie about his sex life, but who now thinks it would be wrong to prosecute those who ordered torture based upon a clearly unconstitutional executive power grab designed to provide cover for anyone who broke the law. Taylor even goes so far as to say that Obama will probably need to preserve these powers because he will be faced with the need to do the same things.
Today Ruth Marcus proves that this has gelled into Beltway conventional wisdom, which is entirely predictable. Taylor is one of the"serious" people among the legal punditocrisy, a man who is trustworthy because while he is clearly a right wing hack, he tut-tuts just enough about right wing excesses to be considered "fair and balanced." His and others' assertion that some unknown extremist Justice Department functionary's cracked legal opinion absolves those who ordered law breaking is now the default view among the beltway elites.Indeed, it was likely never in dispute.
Marcus discusses this in the context of Mark "Deepthroat" Feldt's death this week-end and Ronald Reagan pardoning him for having illegally spied on Americans in the 1970s. She feels compassion, as many people do, for people of her own social class who find themselves in trouble with the law. And like all establishment types, she sees no good purpose in putting nice elites in the dock and convinces herself that pardons in these cases are always required in order to heal the country and move on. Except, as Glenn Greenwald points out in this masterful take down of her column today, the country is never actually healed and we never move on.
In fact, I have long argued that most of the past 35 years have been one long, horrific orgy of undemocratic political thuggery and conservative usurpation of the constitution. They get caught, they suffer some temporary public disapprobation, people like Feldt are caught in strange moral quandries, we define democracy down, but there is never any official sanction. It's become so common that we now this as a natural part of our politics --- the Republicans seize power, they use it in illegal and undemocratic ways, they are exposed, the Democrats win, they fail to hold them accountable and the cycle starts again. (Why, if we didn't know any better, we might think they were all in on it together! Heavens...)
Meanwhile, the villagers know these people as friends. (Indeed, they resent the public for being unpleasant about all this.) I wrote a post a while back about the beltway's reaction to the Christmas Eve pardons that illustrates how they think:
Here's some world weary beltway wisdom from our old pal Richard Cohen in the Wapo's December 30, 1992 issue, who had his suspicions, but in the end just shrugged his shoulders and moved on:
Back when Caspar Weinberger was secretary of defense, he and I used to meet all the time. Our "meetings" -- I choose to call them that -- took place in the Georgetown Safeway, the one on Wisconsin Avenue, where I would go to shop and Cap would too. My clear recollection is that once -- was it before Thanksgiving? -- he bought a turkey.
I tell you this about the man President Bush just pardoned because it always influenced my opinion of Weinberger. (In contrast, I submit the member of the House leadership who had an aide push the cart.) Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense -- which is the way much of official Washington saw him. It seemed somehow cruel that he should end his career -- he's 75 -- either as a defendant in a criminal case or as a felon. The man deserved better than that.
And so when Weinberger was indicted by Lawrence E. Walsh, the special Iran-contra prosecutor, I despaired. Weinberger had been on the "right" side of the debate within the Reagan administration of whether to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held in Lebanon. He opposed the swap, but he did so in confidence. Clearly, he lost the argument, and he may have lost his good sense when he allegedly withheld evidence. That being said, I was pleased when he was pardoned.
[...]
We now know that Bush kept a diary that, until recently, he withheld from the special prosecutor. My guess is that we will eventually get even more evidence of Bush's participation in the making of the arms-for-hostages policy but that, ultimately, his role will always be in dispute. That, in a way, is fitting. It conforms to his posture on raising taxes, on abortion, on civil rights and on judicial appointments, the misrepresentation of Clarence Thomas as eminently qualified for the court above all. A kind of haze, a political-ideological miasma, is the fitting legacy of the Bush presidency.
Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that's all right with me. As for the other five, they are not crooks in the conventional sense but Cold Warriors who, confident in the justice of their cause, were contemptuous of Congress. Because they thought they were right, they did not think they had to be accountable. This is the damage the Cold War did to our democracy.
And so it goes.
This all began with Nixon and the pardon, in my opinion. Many of us, myself included, believed as Marcus and Taylor still do, that forgiveness is a good thing, that the country needs to heal after a tumultuous time and there is no purpose in dragging people through the mud. But I was wrong then and they are still wrong today. How many times do we have to be hit over the head with this stuff before we realize that these people are getting more and more radical with each successive bite at the apple?
Dennis is reviewing Frost/Nixon tonight and I look forward to seeing it. I remember the original interviews quite well and I recall thinking I must have misunderstood when Nixon said "if the president does it it isn't illegal." (And the corollary is Gerald Ford's dictum that an impeachable offense is whatever the congress says it is. ) But it is really that simple for these people. It's about using the levers of power without restraint or concern for the spirit of the constitution to advance their agenda. Obviously the Bush administration created a more complicated set of legal arguments around the commander in chief and "wartime" but Nixon's simple explanation was far more elegant --- and honest --- in its simplicity.
Nixon's legacy is not just presidential lawlessness, although it is. It's not just conservative belief in imperial prerogatives, although it's that too. His legacy is also a political establishment that rejects legal accountability by pretending to be protective of the nation's delicate sensibilities when it is actually covering up for it's miscreant elders so as not to disrupt their own community. This is the essence of the village critique --- it's the parochialism, stupid. It's all about them.
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