Sometime in the early afternoon next Tuesday – after Barack Obama takes the oath of office, and before the new President and First Lady take the traditional stroll up Pennsylvania Avenue – one of the day’s most joyous events will be ignored by the vast majority of inauguration watchers. TV viewers will be taking a long-needed lunch/potty break; meanwhile, on the National Mall, several million jubilant yet wretched souls (myself included) will begin wondering whether it’s worth continuing to freeze our asses off outdoors, or whether we should blow off the parade and go see a movie.
At that hour, on the Capitol grounds, a once-powerful private citizen will board a helicopter and leave the city in which he has resided these last eight years. As he lifts off and flies over that city – a metropolis whose defining institutions he has left in profoundly worse shape than he found them – one can only hope that he will look down upon those millions of revelers and achieve an all-too-rare moment of self-awareness. That he’ll turn to his wife and say, “Laura, there sure are a frickin’ lot of people down there who are glad to see me go.”
As the hours blissfully speed away toward the end of the Bush administration, assessments of its “legacy” continue to bog down – not over the relative weights of its accomplishments (were there any?), nor over rankings of its disastrous failures, but over an astonishing question that pretty well defines the first decade of the 21st century: Will these criminals ever be punished?
The question is not, were crimes committed? They were. On torture and indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on the partisan hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys and other supposedly non-political appointees, on cooking the intelligence that led us into Iraq, on shielding the identity of a covert CIA operative – and on heaven knows what other nefarious actions? — history will indeed record that criminality ran rampant through George W. Bush’s administration.
How much those crimes will continue to cost us as a nation, in terms of constitutional liberties defiled and international standing lost, is yet to be determined. But the prevailing expectation is that the perpetrators of those crimes – from Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and their uppermost advisors straight down through the executive-branch bureaucracy – will walk away from them scot-free, subject to no verdict apart from that rendered by history. And as Bush himself has gleefully reminded us on numerous occasions lately, “By the time history renders its verdict, you and I will be dead. So I don’t worry about history.” (more…)
