Sure, George Bush signed the document. And technically it wasn't a pardon, but merely a commutation of sentence. But that's just semantics. For all practical purposes, Dick Cheney pardoned Scooter Libby. Now the question is: Will he get away with it?
This is really nothing more than a rant. I'm not offering any new information. Hell, I'm not even offering a new rant. But it just makes me so mad. Mad enough to strangle a pasty-faced, overweight, bald plutocrat with my bare hands. I wonder where I could find one?
Seriously, though, how did we get here? How did things go so wrong? How did a man who excretes evil from his pores the way skunks excrete stink end up as the de facto ruler of the United States? Are we as Americans truly so self-absorbed that we couldn't see how bad this man – and all of the ones surrounding him – really was? Maybe – maybe – that could be forgiven in 2000. People can be fooled, and, to be fair, the Bush/Cheney ticket didn't really win that election. But what about since then? Where's the outrage? Where are the people protesting in the streets? Where are the chanting crowds demanding the impeachment of this administration?
They stole a national election and nobody cared. They started an unnecessary war and nobody cared. They mismanaged the war on terror and nobody cared. They stole a second election and nobody cared. They lied about outing Valerie Plame and nobody cared. And now they've pardoned the crony they threw under the bus. Will anybody care?
What does it take to rouse Americans off their collective asses? A few years ago I would have thought that $3.50-per-gallon gasoline would have been more than enough to generate widespread public outrage. Boy, did I underestimate Americans' capacity for apathy.
Is the Internet to blame? I wonder. Follow my reasoning: Back in the sixties, when the crimes of the American government became so egregious as to be intolerable, people took to the streets. Their outrage became a public protest. It was large, it was loud, and it was right there for everyone to see. The press covered it extensively because it was so huge that it couldn't be ignored.
But now we have the Web. Instead of taking to the streets, we take to the keyboard. Hell, I'm doing it right now. If this was 1967 instead of 2007, I might be speaking at a peace rally instead. But here I am. Here we all are. And while we on the left are clearly outraged by the behavior of our so-called "leaders," our anger and our energy and our eloquence is confined to the virtual world. The only people who see it are those who agree or are otherwise seeking it out. The rest of the country remains blithely ignorant, whether willfully or not. As wonderful as the Internet is, maybe it's not enough. Maybe virtual outrage isn't going to cut it.
Could the kind of public outrage I'm talking about even happen today? Or has apathy become so ingrained that it can't be overcome? I don't know. I'd like to think so, but I have to admit that I have my doubts. There's a part of me that thinks that as long as Americans have the trappings of happiness that they will remain docile. I hope events prove otherwise. Because I truly think that our republic is rotting from within, and if something isn't done soon there may be nothing left to save.