First, please permit this qualifier: no one in the United States, perhaps on earth, despises what Dick Cheney stands for and has wrought more than do I. I’ve even toyed mentally with the vision and pondering what humor might be found in stealing a bit from Ann Coulter and . . .  Well, rather than her fantasy concerning John Edward’s fate, what about Cheney and Bush and Rove and Rice and Rumsfeld and . . . Damn the list in this administration is almost endless.

And that’s the point and the issue I take with Paul Sullivan’s call for Cheney’s resignation: it ain’t just Cheney by a long shot, which are also the odds for his resignation; even if we can only hope. 

NO! And Hell NO, it ain’t just Cheney!

For the past few months I’ve been researching the mistruths, dissembling, and bald-faced lies told by George W. Bush since his days of governor of Texas. I’ve checked and cross-checked my data, and so far the number is north of 120.  Not simple slips and errors mind you, lies.

And George Bush has gotten off, compared to his predecessors Reagan and Bush 41 and Clinton, virtually free. Yeah, yeah, yeah the media, especially the print media have brought W’s miscreant meanderings to light, however never in the blinding glare of a focused spot light. The efforts have been pitifully weak, almost apologetic, the way a teenager looks at a homework assignment, “If I gotta.” “See Page 13A,” or “3B” the directions that follow the half-hearted headline on Page 1 would most likely be what you’d find. None of them certainly have been the Monica all day, Monica all the time that Bill Clinton experienced. And that is not to excuse Clinton’s excesses, only to make a comparison of media coverage of presidential sins.

A corporation is an artificial body, or corpus, created at the forbearing grace of a state. It has no natural obligation to grant the charter. In return for granting a charter that will bestow numerous significant advantages to the corporation — limited liability for whatever misdeeds and mistakes its officers may make, special tax advantages, special treatment in bankruptcy, etc. — the state requires that the corporation’s first objective — not a second or tertiary or other downstream — is to serve the needs of society. After that come profit and the accumulation of wealth by the officers and stockholders.

Nonetheless, this week the Supreme Court moved that primary imperative aside on behalf of the corporation.

The Court also put the vehicle of social justice in reverse, almost all the way to Plessey v Fergusson. A non-activist, conservative judicial approach is to refer to standing precedent as much is possible, attempt to find the will of the States except whenever it is impossible, and to rely on legislative intent except when that intent is unknowable or not discoverable. Ostensibly that is what is supposed to define “strict construction.” More than 180 school districts across the country had struggled with both de jure and de facto racial segregation, and had composed solutions for their respective communities.

This week the Court said, “Nope, we know best.”

And in my 61-year lifetime, perhaps the most violent assault on the First Amendment’s free speech protection was the Court’s horrendous ruling in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. A school district suspended a student who was not on school property or acting on school time for holding up the now infamous banner that carried the quote in the previous sentence. The Court held the school had the authority to act as it did, and much of its rationale was its ability to decipher not only the cryptic message but the student’s intent: promoting illegal drug use. And I wonder “Whaaaa?” 

In my lifetime, I am forced to go back to McCarthy and to Nixon to find a government so turned inward against its citizenry and our Constitutional framework. And I thought we had learned from those terrifying deprecations. Sadly we haven’t, evidently.  

Ben Franklin said the delegates had given us a Republic, if we could keep it. We are on the precipice of losing it.

On the promulgation of unabashed lies, a population’s pursuit of blissful ignorance and a naively simple binary/stark black & white world, and an uber-fuhrer authority figure we are in an intractable war that has cost nearly 4,000 of our best lives, tens of thousands in mutilated American bodies and lives, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others, the mutilation of perhaps a million, the utterly wasteful depletion of our common weal and the demolition of our military. On the same bases we have been sad witness to a synonymous association of “America” with torture, to an at-will shredding of the Article I Constitutional protection of habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. And we are watching a Supreme Court turn activist, abetting, setting in juris writ the most insidious, nearly fascistic corporate leaning orientations.

And those are just thumbnail off-the-cuff tallies of administration misdeeds that at any other time would subject the perpetrators to impeachment and criminal prosecution, with prison sentences the due product.

But how?

It ain’t just Cheney. 

Note prefatory to the following: A legal notion in contract law concerning “informed consent” and the capacity of the parties to contract, requires the disclosure of material facts that a reasonable person would know or should know, given due investigatory and inquiry diligence. A real estate agent in a residential transaction, wherein Agent is representing Seller, cannot avoid legal liability to Buyer for say failing to disclose the presence of toxic waste on the property if Agent’s reasonable inquiry and research would have turned up the fact of the toxic waste. The operative terms here are what a reasonable person “should know” given due investigatory and inquiry diligence.

So, once again, it isn’t just Cheney. Nor is it just Bush. It’s a limp Congress that went along because going along was good politics. It’s a limp media that wouldn’t challenge any of it seriously because a strident component of that media was intimidating. It’s our neighbors, and our friends, and our relatives, even our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers who tune in to Fox, to Rush, to Bill, to Sean, to Ann and all the other fear and hate-mongers, and who voted GOP. By 2004, THEY ALL KNEW! Or, the “should have known.” They are all adults, and are presumed to be, regardless that they may not in true fact be, reasonable persons. Therefore they knew the vileness and the distortions being spewed. They must have pleasured in bathing in those fetid waters. They must have liked the idea of the lies and the death and the desolation and the desecration because they voted with their choice of media and their ballots for more of the same! And now they cannot escape their share of blame by claiming they did not know. They cannot wipe the blood and liability from their hands any more than could Lady Mac Beth by claiming they did not know. They should have!

Unless, until all of us are prepared and wholly ready to confront our neighbors, our friends, our relatives et al with their unmitigated culpability as enablers of the tragedies that would never have secured a toe-hold it is wrong, even somewhat dishonorably cowardly to sluice any of it off as the metastasizing consequential putrescence just of Dick Cheney or George Bush or the neo-con cabal. In other words, we ought not to call for Cheney’s removal — or of any of the others — until we publicly condemn all who put Dick Cheney where he is.

— Ed Tubbs