Accountability Is A Luxury

From Patrick J. Buchanan's Blog

Glenn Greenwald who is fast becoming one of my favorite journalists has this excellent piece.

http://buchanan.org/blog/a-court-decision-that-reflects-what-type-of-country-the-us-is-2857

This is what happens to laws, rules, regulations, and ultimately responsibility and accountability when a country is at war. All of it goes down the drain in the name of national security.

Greenwald main points are:

"I want to add one principal point to all of this. This is precisely how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war. So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror. The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration — even including basic liberties and the rule of law. Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe."

"This is exactly why I find so objectionable and dangerous the ongoing embrace by the Obama administration of these same secrecy and immunity weapons. Obama had nothing to do with the Arar case — all the conduct, and even the legal briefing, occurred before he was President — but he has taken numerous steps to further institutionalize the core injustice here, including in cases that are quite similar to Arar: namely, that the Executive can use secrecy and national security claims to shield himself from the rule of law, even when he’s accused of torture and war crimes. That’s exactly what happened here, yet again."


What we have here is that accountability is a luxury when referring to the Executive Branch. They simply are like the rest of us, they don't want to do the heavy lifting, especially if its done by someone else.

Its strange, after eight years of Bush, we needed another Abraham Lincoln to get the country back in gear. We though that was Obama. How wrong we were. Obama is more like James Buchanan then Lincoln. Instead of saving the leaky boat he is a leaky bucket himself.

What does this mean to Americans in the future? We ultimately have the choice for voting in the same discredited do nothing Democratic Party that promised change and didn’t deliver, and on the other, a rabid, radical, ultra regressive wingnut GOP that is itself promising change from the failed former would be change providers. Has the GOP come up with one plan to reduce the deficit? One plan to fix the economy? One plan for Financial Reform? Their plan is to just promise change because that is what people hope to get. Once they are in power the cycle is restarted.