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.
