Flipping the finger

A few days ago Veep Cheney brazenly said there is no need for Bush to pardon him or other members of the administration because they did nothing wrong. Oh? There are lots of people who would disagree.

Cheney, who was Chief of Staff for Gerald Ford and annoyed at what the office of the president was giving up as a result of Watergate, has been working diligently to restore those powers to the presidency -- and adding as many more as he can get his hands on. Is this good for the country? The evidence so far is a resounding no.

But this could be what Cheney is really saying: Obama and Congress don't have the balls to investigate him.

Oh, sure, there may be attempts, such as a bill to set up a Commission on Presidential War Powers, which may go nowhere. That's because the Democratic leadership desperately wants to ignore the whole mess and simply prove they are better at governing than Bush and the GOP. Besides, lifting rocks and poking at the bugs crawling about is not a fun job and tends to not make friends. Being a reformer is quite risky.

We're a country of optimists, we focus on the future. However, that also means we are reluctant to spend time and energy over guilt, remorse, and responsibility of the past. Once our reputation is stained, we don't want to face the stain. And the stain spreads. We have yet to face the stain of slavery, Native American genocide, and recently torture, all of which affect modern life.

We can't get the future right until we figure out how the past went so wrong. When we don't understand what went wrong we propose reforms (if we bother at all) that don't fix the real problem. And when that problem pops up again we claim that we've already done all the reforms we should. It is seductive -- especially with the economy in collapse -- to just forget what Bush did. But doing so leaves our democracy in a much more perilous place.

Obama may not use all those new powers Cheney created for him. But you can be sure someone will. And Cheney wins.