It Can't Happen Here
Or can it...
In the 70s we passed the test of Watergate with flying colors. But in the 80s we pretty much wimped out in the test of Iran/Contra. And that failure to act responsibly and decisively set the stage for the crimes of the Cheney/Bush administration.
William Pfaff, on the troubling reaction of Americans to what happened in our country in the last eight years (emphasis mine):
"It," which Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth had both warned against, proved in fact to be very popular. At least this was so until 2008, when the practical and political consequences of this abandonment of law and history finally alienated the electorate.
All that is familiar. What concerns me in this article is something else. It is the fact that the mass of agents and officials of the government, and the vast majority of the population, passively accepted what was done, and even today disputes whether anyone should be held accountable.
Our cowardly refusal to follow the crimes of Iran/Contra wherever they would lead emboldened the criminals in the Cheney/Bush administration, a decade or so later, to commit acts I thought I would never see in America. I have to wonder where our refusal to hold Cheney/Bush officials accountable will lead us.
