AN OLD RIGHT-WING SACK OF GARBAGE DIED YESTERDAY. NOW WHAT ABOUT THE ONES WE HAVE RUNNING OUR GOVERNMENT?

Perhaps you never heard of Maurice Papon, unless you're from France. Even then you might not know who is is was. (He finally died this weekend at the age of 96. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say. Papon had several 15 minutes of fame. The first was during World War II while he was a high official in the collaborationist fascist government of Nazi-occupied Vichy France. The right-wing son of a wealthy bourgeois, he was as slimy then as any number of Bush Regime operatives are now. He worked with the Germans to deport over 1,500 Jewish men, women and children to Nazi death camps where they were murdered.

After it became clear the Nazis were a spent force, he ratted them out to the Resistance and after the war he took on the guise of a "respectable" center-right politician serving both De Gaulle and Valery Giscard d'Estaing (in the cabinet as Budget Minister). As head of the Paris Police Department in the 60s he ordered the Paris Massacre of 1961, although he was never charged with the deaths of the 100-200 dead civilians who were peacefully protesting the Algerian War.

In the 80s he was exposed and charged with crimes against humanity. He dodged trial for a decade but was finally dragged into court in 1997 and found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Like all right wingers who are caught at their crimes, he blamed everyone but himself and never took any responsibility for his monstrous crimes.

I'm in NYC today. Ken and I went to the Met to see an absolutely splendid performance of Jenufa by Leos Janacek. At dinner we got into a discussion of whether or not the criminals of the Bush Regime are likely to ever face trials. It's very much on my mind because I'm in the middle of Joe Conason's brilliant new book, It Can Happen Here. Conason's book has inspired me to start keeping a list of the most grievous of the criminals that have infested our government, not just Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld and the best known but also less-known but no less culpable monsters very much like Monsieur Papon, characters like John Yoo, Richard Mellon Scaife, Michael Ledeen, Laurence Silberman, William Boykin, the plotters and traitors who have done our nation and our society and our whole world such immense harm. Ken says that outside of his fantasies, the chances for judicial retribution are "zero." (That's a quote.)

Maybe because my fantasies have long ago superseded trials and moved on to matters that are dangerous to discuss in public forums-- even as fantasies-- I feel more certain that there must and will be trials. I know others feel the same way. A week or two ago there was a bit of a hubbub because George Soros started the discussion of the need for a denazification type process in a post-Bush America. You can imagine who the neo-Nazi fellow travelers on the right squealed like stuck pigs at the suggestion.

But it isn't a spurious point. For America to move forward and get back on track it is important that all of us understand what happened and why it happened and that a national dialogue ensue about what we can do to make sure another episode like this can never happen again. To brush this regime's crimes under the carpet and weave them into the fabric of a legitimate, albeit mediocre presidency, would in itself be a crime. Because it can indeed happen here and we have to work hard to make sure it doesn't.