Here is a brilliant commentary by Keith Olbermann on Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence. The comparison with the trajectory of Watergate---where Nixon's injudicious firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox was the final straw leading to Nixon's resignation---indicates how the political landscape has, since then, hardened into a seemingly impermeable crust of criminality and corruption.
At issue now as then, Olbermann suggests, is Cox's question of whether we are to be a nation of men, not laws. I agree, but on the other hand it has always been persons, and more specifically certain of their virtues---their integrity, their compassion, their desire to do good, their desire to avoid shame---that have ultimately kept us safe from the abuses of those in positions of great political power. What has happened since Nixon had the decency to resign is that right-wingers have woken up precisely to the fact that it wasn't laws that were preventing them from achieving their nefarious purposes; that if they ditched their scruples and shamelessly went for the gusto, nothing in particular would stop them. The real question now, as then, is whether we are to be a nation of law-abiding persons, not criminals. And what's different now is the answer given by those even at the highest stations of government: yeah, we're criminals; so what?
This right-wing strategy has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams thanks not just to the opposition's still playing by the old rules and assumptions, but also because almost no one has been able to admit to themselves or anyone else that criminals have been installed as the leaders of the U.S., much less take appropriate action to put them behind bars or at least out of office. Human virtues are also the ultimate ground of the laws' being enforced, and here too things have evidently taken a turn for the worse.
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