We need a really thorough investigation of this at the very least.

and use there political position to stop or block investigations into criminal activity are just as GUILTY as those who committed the crime in the first place and need to be prosecuted too.

Perhaps I am strange in thininking that the Laws of the United States should apply to all equally.

Since then no one ever says, "No one is above the law."

So, yes, yes you are strange.

continue to put up with it?

are the majority happy with living in a country where our elected leaders can do what ever they want and get away with it?

that the Democrats and the Republicans are equally bad?

(other than it being a political attack)

Pelosi should have impeached Bush. A big part of this is her fault.

people who openly broke the law were prosecuted and corporations were not people.

but as far as "people who openly broke the law were prosecuted" is a bit open to interpretation.

I don't think capitalism was EVER kindler and gentler. There was a period from about the 1930s-80s - 50 years at best - when we had what I call the Great American Experiment. Public education, manufacturing jobs, some class mobility. In the end blatant capitalism won out and refused to be tamed. We can try to do it again or we can evolve to socialism (my preference). I'd start right off by nationalizing the financial sector, health care, and energy.

Should have spoken to the prosecution of criminals a little more pointedly - yes the Bush posse should be taken to the Hague. But there are many more who could also be considered criminals, this country has been particularly adept at war-mongering in order to protect resources. At a base level you want to see things like torture punished, but also consider this system and how it supports the behavior. Both facets need to be addressed.

which IMHO is what will actually save capitalism in the end and as long as BOTH parties are corporate whores things will not change but only get worse.

Next step full blown fascism in America.

this has nothing to do with bad actors ("corporate whores&quot - this is systemic. When you have an economic system that rewards greed that is what you are going to get. Fascism is what we have NOW - we have the allusion of "freedom" - but who really does what they want? The top 1% who has the money to do so. Everyone else plods along doing their best, trying not to lose the little work they have, and trying to keep their own family from starving. That is not "freedom" for 99% of us.

Fucking republicans will attempt to obscure any issue to continue their wealth grabbing.

"Next step, full blown fascism," "We've almost got racism," etc.

It's already here. Everything is for moneyed interests. It's now going global.

But I know what you mean. It's the blissful unawareness of the rot in the middle that many of us miss. Knowing things comes with a price.

When the authorities which we rely upon to supply us with our information are found to be lying and covering up, one must assume their guilt and complicity.

What else did the Bush Administration try to cover up?

* The economic indicators that showed Bush Administration policies were driving our economy into the toilet and leading us into a real estate bubble.

* The stories of truckloads of bodies being dumped in the streets of Baghdad, usually murdered after torture. No truckload of bodies was ever intercepted even though the US ran random traffic check-points for the entire four years the assassination program ran. But KBR is still being sued for hauling bodies in the same necrotic truck that was used to deliver ice to the troops, and sickening them.

* How the election results in Ohio in 2004 were tallied and reported, how the results were sent through RNC servers, and how the final results emerged as more or less exactly opposite of the exit polls which suggested Kerry would win.

* The fact that the Bush Administration had close ties to the Pakistani intelligence official who funded the 9/11 terrorists, to the point where that fellow was even on hand in Washington to personally witness the attack on the Pentagon with the future Bush-appointed Director of the CIA, while just down the street George H. W. Bush was doing the same thing with Osama bin Laden's brother.

All of those incidents were covered up, too. Logically, since the US federal government is the authority responsible for explaining to us what, exactly happened, and it instead expended great efforts to deceive the public, prevent the circulation of good information, and misdirect in all of the incidents I name above, we must also assume that the Bush Administration lied about and was involved in all of those incidents as well.

You'll see.

...if Alex Jones is really paranoid and a conspiracy theorist or if he's on to something. When he's right it gets a little scary and my world goes askew.

And sometimes being on to something can make you a conspiracist. Anyone who truly believes there's no such thing as conspiracies hasn't ever gotten together with their friends about what lie to tell their parents. A conspiracy doesn't have to be a handful of people getting together in formal meetings with a list of agenda points. It can be something as simple as an unwritten understanding between people. Like rich people as a group understanding that they need to watch each other's backs, or bankers carefully avoiding outing one of their group for illegal activities. I would hazard a guess that most conspiracies are quite innocently perpetrated.

especially the comments about perpetuating a system. No one has to sit in a room and say "ok how do we screw over everybody else today" - it's rarely that blatant. Simply by quietly supporting a corrupt system you are doing the same thing.

Always. No one person can personally sweep the record clean. That requires a virtual army of subordinates, flagrant law-breaking, and a willingness to defend the lies they told long after they are shown to be false. It is not paranoia to spot the signs of cover-up and assume the worst. That is what one must logically do, and everyone who didn't has been consistently proven wrong for defending whatever lie the Bush people were telling that day.

The Bush Administration did all that on a wide array of issues, and drip by drip we are beginning to see that those who spotted the cover-up and assumed complicity were correct to do so.

As many of us argued for years right here at DU, while our comments on the subject were swept into the dungeon and thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people died.

I'm not making this shit up, by the way. Nixon went down for the cover-up, not the crime. It was only much later that the crimes themselves were more fully exposed. The Bush Administration, being effectively a continuation of the criminal ways of the Nixon Administration, was smart enough to delay a Watergate-like drubbing until they got out.

Today we reap the sorrow of our misplaced trust, and only the conspiracy theorists are unsurprised, because it was they who were right the whole time, not the rest of us.

Of fucking course they knew it was illegal...otherwise why all the mind bending word twisting PR exercises to make it sound legal.

As well as that of the two posters below.

God Damned fig leaf to hide behind.

And we all knew it.