A Hundred %$#@#&!!%$# Days

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

The spy novelist John Le Carre invented a word perfectly suited for Richard Bruce Cheney and George W. Bush — “politopath,” a merger of “politician” and you-know-what.

In a few hours, we’ll reach the beginning of the end of the Cheney-Bush regime, the final hundred days. It ought to be a milestone marked by glee, yes? But knowing how soon we won’t have this pair of politopaths to kick around anymore places me somewhere between an aneurysm and a sigh. Because the puppet master and his perpetually adolescent companion will get to abandon their posts, unpunished for hundreds of lies told, hundreds of people tortured, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, trillions of dollars of debt incurred.

Unimpeached, much less tried, they will get to emerge from their eight years of assault on the Constitution and display of royal prerogative with their pensions intact and most of their rap sheets classified. No orange jumpsuits for them, no isolation units where guards videotape their every trip to the shitter, no hard labor, no electronic shackles. Two aging war criminals will soon clean out their desks, torch their hard drives, say farewell to the pleasures of the unitary executive and pal around forever with the feral plutocrats whose vaults they so prodigiously filled during two terms of plunder and rapine.

Like the reckless CEOs who’ve walked away from the wreckage of their companies with tens of millions in salaries, options and bonuses, the ruthless Mister Bush and Bunker Dick seem destined to roam free. Starting on that January afternoon of a hundred days from now, even the suggestion that they – and others on their team – should pay for their misdeeds will be shouted down in wwwLand and elsewhere. Old news, the megamedia will declare. Vendettas erect obstacles to bipartisanship, Democratic Party leaders will proclaim. Too many crucial matters other than justice to worry about, the so-called pragmatists will say. Just as they have said since I wrote A Thousand %$#@#&!!%$# Days 900 days ago.

Back then some of us still believed, however tenuously, that there might be at least a mild comeuppance for the guys who lied us into war at the point of a bayonet labeled 9/11 and were trying to lie us into a few more. Who disinformed people digging at Ground Zero about the health risks even as they inhaled the ashes of their fellow New Yorkers. Who gave us Mission Accomplished, Bring ’em on, Abu Ghraib, bogus yellowcake, poorly armored Humvees, looting by Halliburton, gunplay by Blackwater, and a free pass for Osama into Waziristan. Who extraordinarily rendered suspects to secret torture prisons and secretly developed an energy plan by, for and of the petro-giants. Who tapped our phones to crush dissent and tapped our wallets to flood cronies with cash and tapped into a rich vein of American xenophobia to carry out the War on (some) Terrorists.

With impeachment not yet yanked off the table 900 days ago, there was a smidgen of hope that a reckoning might come for Cheney and Bush. However small, there seemed to be a chance that maybe, just maybe, they might be yanked away from the levers of power and we’d be spared a year or at least a few months of their blood-soaked regime. There was hope that investigations might lead to interrogations that might lead to subpoenas that might lead to indictments. Not likely, not probable even, but at least possible. Alas, ’twas not to be.

Despite the relentless stream of fresh revelations from whistleblowers and a slightly awakened press, despite defections by generals and civilian insiders on the regime’s own team, nobody with clout intervened to slam the brakes on their naked imperialism, much less stop their treasury-busting, diplomacy-wrecking, human rights-smashing endeavor. Given chance after chance to bring Cheney and Bush to heel in the Iraq war, to include illegally incarcerated suspects under the rule of law, to reject immunity for the violators of civil liberties, to vote on articles of impeachment, the majority in Congress repeatedly crumpled.

The regime’s unswerving adherence to the demented ideology of the NeanderCons, its colossal corruption and its pursuit of disgraceful policies from Baghdad to New Orleans drove down approval percentages in poll after poll but catalyzed too few Representatives and Senators into action. Sure, a gazillion words were spoken. Innumerable stern letters were couriered. But Cheney and Bush, the gray eminence and the nameplate, charged ahead, ferociously and successfully contemptuous of the wimpish responses to their crimes.

But even as they concocted war and shredded the Constitution, Mister Bush and the rogue who had selected himself  to be the string-pulling second-in-command were not distracted from their other tasks. From Day One, they worked with gangrenous fervor on the oligarchy’s agenda, appointing Federalist Society judges, plunking foxes into oversight agencies, undermining health and safety rules, eviscerating environmental protections, ridiculing global warming, presiding over an abstinence-only rise in teenage pregnancy, ignoring the needs of soldiers and veterans alike, seeking to privatize everything, rewriting scientific reports, degrading civil liberties, deregulating corporadoes and detaxing the ultra-rich. Just as Bush had done in Texas as governor, they transformed a modest government surplus into a mountainous annual deficit. They took a debt of $5.7 trillion, accumulated over 20 decades, and jacked it up to $10.2 trillion in less than one.

And then there was their impact on the economy, education and the English language.

Most of that, obviously, was not impeachable, merely Republicans doing their usual malicious thing, with help from Blue Dogs and other Democratic enablers. Just one another round of dismantling the FDR legacy as initiated by the iconic Reagan. But they went so much further.

Not that they were the first leaders of the executive branch to lie America into an unjust war. We’ve had plenty of that. Nor the first to try to geld a section or two of the nation’s founding document. The imperial presidency was not their invention. But for sheer brazenness in their anti-democratic machinations, surely Cheney and Bush are unmatched in our history. If ever two U.S. leaders deserved trial for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is they. In a hundred days, however, they’ll have flown the coop. And if not enough responsible parties could be swayed to impeach them while they still reigned, how much more impossible will it be to investigate their misdeeds after they depart, much less make  them defend themselves in a courtroom?

It’s said that history will judge. No matter how harsh, that’s far too easy a tribunal for these politopaths. And far too late.