An Epitaph for the Bush Years- By Scott Horton

Today, Bush and his family moved out of the White House to Camp David, where they plan to vacation before Inaugural Day. As we await the formal transfer of power, the process of judgment on the presidency of George W. Bush has accelerated. The Bush years now need an epitaph.

What is the message to be carved over this massive cesspool of a failed presidency? I turn to Augustine, the early church father whose writings represent the first effort by a Christian theologian to come to grips with the duties of civil governance. “If it does not do justice,” he writes in the City of God, “what is the government but a great criminal enterprise?” That fits the Bush Administration perfectly, for it shows its key failing and it serves as admonishment to the government that follows him.

In the chapters in which this sentence appears, Augustine reminds us of the importance of process and the risks inherent in the temptation of power. It is easy, he says, for those with an inclination to politics to stumble down a false path. The process of accretion of power becomes means and ends both; the vision of a more noble society which serves humanity fades in favor of the “realities” of the quotidian struggle for still more power. Augustine approaches the problems as part practical political philosopher and part divine. He reaches instructively for the example of a criminal band. How ultimately can a gang of thugs be distinguished from a government? He asks. The question is ironic, but it is also earnest. There is a distinction, and it lies in the concept of justice. Essential to the legitimacy of a government is a commitment to justice in the treatment of the state’s citizens or subjects and in the treatment of other states. Absent this, the state is no more than a criminal enterprise.

Nothing so marked the Bush years as a corrupted sense of justice. On the domestic side, under the influence of Karl Rove, Bush introduced the regime of the perpetual campaign. His conduct of government was about the steady accretion and perpetuation of power. To this end, the institutions of government were severely undermined and turned to a partisan political purpose. No agency of our government was more sadly disfigured than the Justice Department, which became little more than a machine for the advancement of partisan projects. We see this in the gutting of the Civil Rights Division and the crude manipulation of the Voting Rights Section. And in an unguarded moment in an interview with Larry King last week, Bush admitted that he turned the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) into a rubber stamp that validated and legalized his most cockeyed and even criminal ideas. Like Nixon, the Bush team believe that “if the president does it, it is not a crime.” But they go further, debasing the Justice Department by having it issue formal opinions saying that black is white. With an OLC opinion in their pocket, the “loyal Bushies” felt free to torture, wiretap without warrants and commit other still uncatalogued crimes all in the name of presidential power. Deep in the bowels of Bush Justice the plans were laid for an imperial presidency, bursting the bounds imposed by the law and the Constitution—which in theory the Justice Department lawyers were sworn to uphold. This provides one of the more spectacular demonstrations of Augustine’s notion in modern American history, namely, when justice and the fidelity to law that manifests it is cast aside, political actors begin to behave increasingly like a band of thugs. That the Justice Department should emerge as the beating heart of a criminal enterprise is shocking, but that fact becomes more and more apparent with each successive disclosure.>>>>>>snip

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004222

"do justice".

Carve it on the tombstone of this despicable regime.

We don't want them to go free. Or to spend the rest of their lives in Dubai. Justice Now. * is so malleable. He's easily manipulated given the right combo of drugs, year after year after year.