Is The Law Off The Table?

Richard Nixon and those of his ilk, such as Pat Buchanan on MSNBC's Morning Joe, think that law is politics and politics is law when politicians are the ones being investigated.

The reasoning goes, you can't prosecute for torture because it would implicate Bush II and Cheney and therefore it would be political witch hunting, not the enforcement of law.

That theory was blown out of the water and proven false with the Libby prosecution during the Bush II years.

Cheney had covered up successfully and the consequence was that only Scooter Libby was prosecuted.

The big story there is that the jury had no issue with it being a political vs a legal case, and indicated in interviews after the unanimous verdict for conviction that they would have found Cheney guilty too, without any "its a political issue" notions hijacking those proceedings.

Chuck Todd of MSNBC likewise does not get it because he seems to think the only prosecution possible is a political prosecution.

Todd and Buchanan have a slippery slope floating around in their minds, which slides into the banana republic pit where politicians are above the law because the law is not on the table because everything is a "policy decision".

Bush II operatives flagrantly and egregiously violated the law time and time again with impunity, Scooter Libby being only one of them.

Obama is said to want to review the murder of 2,000 Afghans committed by the Bush II apparatus there in Afghanistan.

So again, if he does so is the law off the table; or will torture and murder only be exposed in an "open government" policy; but never prosecuted because of a "no prosecutions for policy differences" policy?

If the law is off the table and egregious criminal actors are not prosecuted for those crimes, the United States will suffer greatly, once again, in world opinion as a direct and certain consequence of that failure to prosecute.

The mature nations of the world know a banana republic when they see one.

And Americans know it even better.