Comedian turned conservative radio jock Dennis Miller is one of those intellectuals that is so overburdened with a sense of himself that he is literally incapable of abandoning the rolling blackouts of pedantic white noise that he employs when opining on anything. Personally, it stuns me when a man that obviously possesses such intelligence actually credits the Bush Administration with doing what he feels had to be done in the interests of national security – the historic mother of all justifications of excusable villainy.
Now is not the time to silently gift the Bush Administration a free pass, nor is it the time to forget its abuse and degradation of the Constitution, its role in the diminishment of global human rights standards post 9/11, its disregard for international law, and its use of criminal practices and falsehoods to attain its objectives. Now is not the time to overlook the fact that the United States has held hundreds of individuals outside of any measure of the law, without council, without recourse, and yet claims to be a nation of laws. Now is not the time to overlook Extraordinary Rendition, Black Sites, and the use of foreign nations in which torture is not frowned upon to do America’s dirty work. Now is not the time to overlook the fact that the United States illegally invaded a country based on lies fed the public that has cost the lives of thousands of Americans and, most likely, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Now is the time to remember what has occurred over the last seven years and hold those guilty to account – even if all that is left us is to do so with our collective conscience.