Bushists have remade the idea of scandal to include no consequences

[BurtWorm]

According to Mark Danner in an interview on salon.com (Interviewer Tom Englehardt's questions are in bold):

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/02/28/engelhardt/print.html

You've talked about our current American world as one of "frozen scandal," an interesting phrase. When you first used it, we were in the Downing Street Memo scandal and nothing was happening. Now, we're immersed in the NSA and other scandals and nothing is happening.

The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as Step 1, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step 2 would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra and others. And finally, Step 3 would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, Look, we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.

You get revelation and repetition.

Yes, R and R. It's been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there's been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished...

Minor figures...

...who were silly enough to get themselves caught -- for example, the military police whose images appear in the Abu Ghraib digital pictures. The actual policymakers responsible for the change in interrogation policy will suffer no punishment whatsoever. In fact, they're still in their jobs. None of the investigations has reached them. Even the people who actually carried on the interrogations themselves we know very little about.

[Stephanie]

1. Washington DC 2006 is exactly like the Armstrong ranch

The sheriff is in the pockets of the manor house and all of the party guests are keeping their mouths shut.

[unblock]

2. this is why democrats MUST be vindictive

carter's biggest blunder had nothing to do with inflation or hostages. his biggest blunder was failing to BURY the republican party with watergate. letting them dole out their own penalty, pardon included, and kill further investigation let them basically get away with it, and it obviously only emboldened them. in retrospect, carter played chamberlain, appeasing the republicans.

we simply MUST convince america that there ARE consequences to the kind of crimes that the banana republicans are pulling. they CANNOT simply get away with this.

[populistdriven]

3. HUGE thumbs UP!!!! Everyone needs to read this one!

[unblock]

6. i don't know if you've paid any attention to my posts,

but the more brilliant and insightful, the more likely it is to drop like a stone....

[BurtWorm]

8. Often the case.

[BurtWorm]

4. "The icebergs are floating by..."

:kick:

[dusty64]

5. This is sadly

what happens when you allow your elections to be hijacked into one party fascist rule.

[UTUSN]

7. & controlling the framing, with Dems repeatedly in flat footed positions