This is how democracy dies

Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, the Dick Cheney of the German Weimar Republic in its terminal phase (1930-33)

Dick Cheney may be the chief executioner of the moment. But American democracy didn't get to its current late-Weimar status without complicity on the other side of the partisan aisle, as well. And, no, it has hasn't just been Joe Lieberman. These kinds of capitulations are wrong for the country and democracy, and not even sensible in any kind of reasonable electoral calculation. Congress - which the former blogger Billmon sometimes referred to as our Chamber of People's Deputies (an ironic reference to the former East Germany) - should be doing better than this:

What About the Senate Intelligence Committee? by Dan Froomkin Washington Post Online 01/23/08 (scroll down) Why hasn't the Democratic Congress completed and released the long-delayed Phase II report on the Cheney-Bush administration's WMD fraud that the Republican Congress previously suppressed? Well, you see, according to a spokesperson for Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the good Senator didn't want to do anything that "would again create tension" with the Republicans.

That's just obscene.

Your Harry Reid-led Senate in action by Glenn Greenwald Salon 01/23/08. Senate Democrats are working mightily to give telecom corporations immunity for lawbreaking at the request (and probably threats) of the Cheney-Bush administration. Also obscene.

Consequences for ignoring congressional subpoenas: None by Glenn Greenwald Salon 01/23/08. Maybe not obscene. But definitely pathetic. Very, very pathetic.

A change of administration is not enough to undo the damage of the Cheney-Bush days. One thing that will be needed is some kind of through investigation and public airing of the results, including criminal prosecutions for the most seriously illegal and damaging acts, of the massive span of wrongdoing during this current administration.

The administration of Jerry Ford the Healer, whose chiefs of staff were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, did all it could to leave the Watergate conspiracies and wretched history of the Vietnam War behind them. Fortunately, they weren't entirely successful in sweeping it all under the rug.

But Dick Cheney, along with Rummy and Karl Rove and a small horde of other Little Nixons, came back to Washington three decades later and took Nixon's plans to create a semi-police state much farther than Nixon ever was able to do. And the consequences have been far less. There needs to be a reckoning, a legal and practical and public reckoning, for what happened during the Cheney-Bush administration. And its needed to break the chain of authoritarian thought and practice that has been the operating principle of this astonishingly corrupt and criminal administration.

And let's be clear. Fixing responsibility for this hyper-partisan administration's misdeeds will be fixing responsibility almost exclusively on Republicans, because they were the ones running this horrible show. That means the Democrats need to have the backbone to push such investigations and prosecutions even though they unquestionably will "again create tension" with the Republicans.

If the Democrats settle for Lieberman/Rockefeller/Reid bipartisan pseudo-harmony in this, there will be no gratitude on the Republican side. Only contempt for Democratic fecklessness.

And the next time the Cheneyists take power, today's Cheney-Bush late-Weimar brand of government will look like the good old days.

Tags: authoritarianism, democratic party, democrats