CRIME AND PUNISHMENT-- BUSH AND CHENEY AND GEORGE SOROS

My friend Adam sent me a video today that he watched on Olbermann's show. It shows how American troops have to drive down the streets of Iraq just to survive-- to avoid being blown up when stuck in traffic. Watch it and ask yourself, “If this were troops from some occupying country driving down my streets, how would I feel towards them?” In fact, more than anything else it reminded me of a science fiction movie where aliens from another galaxy have come to earth, taken over, and regard the inhabitants as little more than the way we regard insects.

Meanwhile, right-wing kook Marty Peretz and the online wingnuts and Murdoch are all up in arms today because George Soros, himself a childhood victim of the Nazis, mentioned at Davos that after we get rid of the Bush Regime, America should go through a little de-Nazification process.


Basically, Soros was pointing out that fascist Turkey and Japan are still having problems in not dealing with their dark pasts while the U.S. de-Nazification program in Germany-- instituted to deal with the crime of pre-emptive war far more than to deal with the Holocaust-- has turned Germany into a functioning, healthy, modern democracy.

As Steve Clemons in the Washington Note pointed out this morning this is a shitstorm that progressives need to think about.

Soros properly and appropriately referred to de-Nazification because that was a process that assured that there was accountability for the deadly, barbarous, and horrible actions taken by the government of Germany. Like in Japan, political and military leaders -- and some social, educational, and business leaders -- were purged from their offices in order for those of different political ilk to come into positions of power.
Soros is referring to political accountability and political change after what many conservatives are calling a series of the worst political and military strategic mistakes in modern American history. He is referring to those in the White House and in American politics who turned a blind eye after Abu Ghraib, who did nothing when people were shut up -- some mistakenly -- without legal counsel in Guantanamo. He is referring to those who sat on information related to the Haditha horror until it was exposed.

If you've been following DWT for a while, you probably know I'm a law and order fanatic. We started this blog to help expose Randy "Duke" Cuningham, Bob Ney, the Republican crime machine in Ohio, and Tom DeLay's Culture of Corruption in DC. And you probably know I had no reason in the world to go to Paraguay this year other than to hunt down the Bush family's newly purchased secret estate in the remote, roadless Chaco. The idea of Bush (and Cheney) leaving office and living the rest of their lives in honor and great wealth, as though their occupation of the Executive Branch was somehow a normal occurrence, is horrible to me. Even a Bush in self-imposed exile in Paraguay is intolerable. These two and their major collaborators must be tried and punished for their systemic criminality. It's what scares me about the Democratic "opposition," which sees them more as "wrong" and "naughty" than as criminal and fiendish.


In the annals of history, will Bush and Cheney rank up there with Hitler, Stalin, Caligula, monarchs and military dictators with similar authoritarian outlooks? I'm guessing they will but I'm not talking about history's judgment. I'm talking about crime and about punishment and about the soul of my country. And so was Soros. For America to leave this nightmare behind and to progress in a way so that we don't fall into this kind of trap again, we absolutely do need, as a nation, a process very much akin to the all-American process we brought the German people in 1945.