There’s something rotten in Washington, D.C. And in Missouri, too.
Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald held his press conference last week to announce the indictment of “Lewie the Leaker” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. While the nature of his 22-month investigation was both interesting and welcome, it was his statements about truth that struck a chord with me.
Fitzgerald said, “Truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.”
The words were an indictment of the judicial system here in Missouri that had ended – once again – in a black man being wrongfully executed. Since 1991, truth has been the last thing sought by the police who beat a confession out of Marlin Gray, a prosecutor who used blatant tactics to suppress the truth during trial, and higher courts who chose not to go through the cesspool of twisted lies and compromised functioning of the circuit attorney’s office.
So, if truth is the engine of the judicial system, where does that put the process in this country and Missouri, in particular?
The U.S. judicial system is not just stalled; it is going in reverse. As the diseased system goes untreated (justice-seeking folks have made the diagnosis!), the cancerous impact on citizens, families and communities goes deeper and gets wider.
On the national scene, we’ve seen the wholesale lies mounting on a variety of fronts. It took author Davis Corn 300-plus pages to cover the lies of the Bush administration in his book The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. These are the ones we know about.
The Bushites incessantly tout the honor of democracy and the Constitution. They remind us about how they are concerned with national security. Then we find out a CIA agent has been outed for the sole reason that her husband publicly disagreed with the Cowboy’s lie for invading Iraq: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to be used against the U.S.
It is clear that laws and rules are only for us peons who don’t have the resources to whack through the thickets of subterfuge, to hire crafty public relations people to repackage lies to look like the truth and to use the judicial system to affirm the corrupted ascent of pure evil.
When one starts connecting the dots and tries to find the lost process, a Matt Blunt starts to look like a George Bush; a Nels Moss looks like a Karl Rove. They treat truth like vampires fighting the light of dawn.
Larry Griffin, Marlin Gray, the 2,000 U.S. casualties in Iraq – they can’t rest in peace until we, the people, “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Until then, the rot of a failed judicial system will be stinkin’ across the land.