Monday, December 15, 2014

What Does The Republican Party Stand For? Whatever It Can Get Away With

It's easy enough to come to that conclusion just from the so-called budget bill that just got approved by Congress over the weekend.  Just in time for the holidays, it's a combined Tea Party Christmas tree and a badly-stuffed gargantuan turkey for the rest of us.  (That may be an insult to turkey's, but I'll live with it.)  The single worst thing about it is that it ratifies, with the help of Democrats, legislative blackmail via "must-pass" legislation.  Unless someone in the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman can learn to grow a spine, this is only the beginning of whittling away civilization, inch by inch.

But that's not all they think they can get away with.  There are much worse things.  Such as torture, and the ability to be prosecuted for it.

By now, of course, you've heard about, and perhaps even read, the Senate's report on "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were used on terrorist suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  I will not list its finding in detail for that reason, although you can learn more about the specifics here if you have not done so already.  It's bad enough that it exceeds the boundaries of international law AND was used against the innocent--and all without taking out bin Laden, which President Obama was able to do without torture.

But what's even worse, if you can imagine such a thing being possible, is that the release of the report was followed up by what was tantamount to a confession on national television.  Former Vice President and torturer-in-chief Dick Cheney appeared last Sunday on "Meet the Press" to say not only that he would do it all over again, but to express no concern whatsoever about the killing of an innocent man in his drive to get "bad guys."  On the subject of persecuting the innocent, this is Cheney's response:  "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States."

No denials of the specifics, even though he separately referred to the report itself as a "crock."  As with domestic politics, in the international arena, to a Republican, the end always justifies the means.  And, just as Cheney did with regard to the international arena, one Republican congressman has used those exact words to justify the budget bill.

And why shouldn't they feel that way?  The United States government, even under Obama, is not going to make any effort whatsoever to either prosecute the guilty domestically or turn them over to international justice, any more than he is apparently going to oppose using budget bills as instruments of ideological blackmail.  So what does the GOP have to fear?

Which is why I take issue with the concept, recently advanced here, that the government should instead issue pardons in order to establish the illegality of the interrogation process.  A pardon only goes into effect once it has been accepted.  And none of these men have any reason to feel a need to accept such a pardon.  Why accept a pardon when there's no threat of prosecution?  If you cared about the rule of law enough to do so, you wouldn't have authorized the illegality in the first place.  This is why Cheney felt free to offer his confession on Sunday.  He knows he'll pay no price for it.  It is this sort of fecklessness about international law by the nations who supposedly observe it that has lead at least one observer to question the need for an international court in the first place.

What does the Republican Party stand for?  For itself.  Not for you.  And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll hopefully shake off your cynicism about politics, and realize that, no matter how hard you try to run away from politics, politics runs after you.

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