A former Governor of Virginia is expected to be sentenced to a long stay in prison. The same fate has befallen governors in states across the United States, including in nearby Maryland, Tennessee, and West Virginia. A former governor of Illinois is in prison. Governors have been convicted of corruption in Rhode Island, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Connecticut, and (in a trumped-up partisan scam) in Alabama. The statewide trauma suffered by the people of states that have locked up their governors has been…well, nonexistent and unimaginable.
Locking U.S. presidents up for their crimes is a different story. Former President Richard Nixon’s understanding that whatever a president does is legal has not been challenged since he made that comment. The Washington Post — not exactly a Nixon supporter — has the same understanding now. The Post recently justified the latest proposal to re-ban torture by explaining that even though torture was already banned, President George W. Bush tortured and therefore had found a legal way around the law. In other words, because he hasn’t been prosecuted, what he did was legal.
The New York Times, which urged prosecuting former President George W. Bush for torture six years ago, recently wrote this:
The editorial goes on to list the people who should be prosecuted, up to and including the former vice president. But the president gets a pass, not on the basis of some reasoned argument, but because the authors cannot imagine a president being held accountable for crimes. They or their colleagues could imagine it several years ago but have progressed to the point where it has become unthinkable.
The state flag of Virginia, or any other of the 50 states, can be turned into a table cloth or a picnic blanket. It can be used to keep the rain off your firewood. Or it can be burned to get your fire started. Nobody cares what you do with it. Children aren’t forced to pray to it every morning in school. It’s just a flag. And because it’s just a flag, nobody has any interest in abusing it, and virtually nobody would recognize what it was if they saw it burned or trampled or turned into a bathrobe or a bikini. The flag of Virginia, although we don’t actually imagine it as having feelings, is treated just fine. So are state songs, even though nobody is required to stand and sing them with a fascistic pose as troops march by.
The same is true of state governors. They’re treated with civility and respect. They’re honored when they perform well and held accountable when they abuse power. Understood as human beings, they aren’t abused as anything less. But they are not gods. And they are not gods because they are not makers of war.
Presidents make wars. And they now do so without any formal checks on their power. They can destroy the earth with the push of a button. They can destroy a hut or a village or a city at their discretion. Their killer flying robots rain hell from the skies worldwide, and neither Congress nor the Washington Post nor the people who lock up governors for taking bribes can even imagine questioning that power, that privilege, that divine right.
Congress may, it is true, “authorize” one of the current wars for three more years after allowing it to proceed illegally for several months. Or it may not. Nobody cares. The pretense that it matters is a vestige of a time in which we saw presidents differently.
But if murdering large numbers of people doesn’t disturb us, if we’ve all concluded that murder is morally superior to imprisonment and torture and that there is no third option, are we perhaps capable of spotting a problem in what presidents have become in relation to the rule of law? Should it not disturb us that we’ve given single individuals for 4- or 8-year runs more power than King George III ever dreamed of, and that we’ve collectively declared any declaration of independence unimaginable?
Originally published at War is a Crime…
David Swanson’s wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
“If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.”- Justice Lewis D Brandeis… The worst thing that Jerry Ford did was pardon Richard Nixon because it sent the message that some people were above the law, that Justice was not for everyone. This was the lesson learned from the Watergate scandal and why voter’s became disenfranchised.
Presidents are gods only because they are puppet of the elite. The elite few with all the money are the real gods. Money controls us all. We have to break up the big financial banks and institutions since they are now sending us to wars, destroying our democracy and freedoms. You thought Bin Laden did that? Nope. The cons are doing it.
They can also pose for silly photos while the World goes to hell. Eleven MILLION refugees from Bashar Assad’s attempts to kill or starve them, not a notice here. Two-thirds are inside Syria and difficult to report on though. Starving not torture? – skip food for a year, get back to me.
Impeachment not mentioned – Obama sure deserves it for ignoring the terrorist magnet Syria has become. But then he blasted to bits the al-Queeda terrorists that killed more Americans on 9-11 than died at Pearl Harbor. Thanks Obama.