Hear this segment as broadcast on The Mike Malloy Show by clicking here.
10 years ago, February 2009, we sent a copy of Vince Bugliosi’s book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder, to the 2,200 district attorneys in the United States who had a soldier from their county killed in Iraq.
As the Independent Media Center reported:
“Bugliosi meticulously lays out a case against George W. Bush for purposefully deceiving the United States into war, thereby causing over 4,000 U.S. soldier deaths and 100,000-plus civilian Iraqi deaths and counting.”
“Bugliosi is in a good position as a former prosecutor to ask—on behalf of millions of people—why should someone who accidentally kills a person in a liquor store holdup be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, yet someone who creates death and destruction on an unimaginable scale sail off into the sunset and have a library named after them? Is U.S. law based on justice, or whim?”
While still raising money for the project in November and December 2008, I sent a press release about the project to every single liberal/lefty leaning website I could find. Not one responded. Not one. Just about all the money was raised from listeners of the Malloy program.
We eventually raised enough money to buy the 2,200 books from the publisher. Then we needed more money to buy thousands of mailers, labels, 6 reams of paper to copy Bugliosi’s cover letter, a ton of stamps, and of course toner for the printer. The entire project cost just under $18,000. Logistically it was a very strange endeavour. The most basic question was … where to store two tons of books without breaking my house?
Not only did 90% of the money come from the Malloy audience, when it came time to send out the books Truth Seekers from the Seattle area came to the house and stuffed the books into mailers. After a couple of weekends the job was finished and the thousands of books were carted off to the post office.
I had previously contacted dozens of newspapers about the book project and finally in March 2009 a reporter from The Seattle Times came to the house for an interview. The title of the article that eventually ran was:
Patriot or crackpot? Seattle man’s mission to prosecute Bush
The article, and the hundreds of reader responses, definitely tilted the scales toward crackpot. For the next couple of months my email inbox was radioactive.
When the dust settled, the result from all that work was:
The Attorney General of The United States, the Attorneys General from all 50 states, and 2,200 District Attorneys all decided to pass on upholding the law.
I thought at least one out of 2,200 District Attorneys would take it on. We’re talking lawyers here. I thought there had to be at least one grandstanding son of a bitch who’d do it just for the headlines. Didn’t anybody want to star in a remake of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Hell?
Nope.
I had, in retrospect, a rather naïve idea. I thought the American legal system and the media would be interested in prosecuting a mass murderer. I did not think at the time it was a matter of “political will.” I thought the media would cover the project simply because it was, if nothing else, a good story.
Note to Self: I was wrong.
George W, Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and all the other architects of the war in Iraq, are fucking war criminals. And the people whose job it was to uphold the law, and the media whose job it was to report the news … were mute.
10 years later …
The media cannot shut the fuck up about Fucko the Clown.
I get it … he’s offensive. He’s an asshole writ large in gold letters. He’s so stupid he has no idea how stupid he is. He’s that lying sack of shit Fucko the Clown.
But …
He did not lie the country into a war that killed a million people and displaced almost 4 million more. Fucko the Clown is one of the supreme shitheads of all time, but he ain’t no Dick Cheney. He’s not smart enough to be a really good psychopath like Cheney. Most of the stories written about the president of the United States seem to be fueled by the outrage that Fucko has bad manners. Don’t get me wrong – Fucko and his henchmen should be in prison for the rest of their lives – but the members of the Bush/Cheney Regime should have been tried, convicted, and executed. As Hannah Arendt wrote in the last page of Eichmann in Jerusalem:
“Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
I’ve been thinking about what happened – and what didn’t happen – 10 years ago simply because it’s one of those chunks of time that seem worthy of some sort of anniversary. I just wish I learned something new from the experience. What I did learn, I already knew.
The Donor Class and their Republican puppets directed and backed the Bush/Cheney Regime in their war of aggression.
10 years later …
The Donor Class and their Republican puppets currently direct and back whatever the fuck it is that comes out of Fucko the Clown’s administration.
Anyone with a sharpened Ticonderoga number 2 pencil can connect two dots and see that Fucko the Clown is the symptom, and the unholy trinity of The Donor Class, their Republican minions, along with their twisted bullshit version of Christianity, is the disease.
As Jack Nicholson said to the ghostly bartender in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,
“Words of wisdom, Lloyd. Words of wisdom.”
So here we all are … waiting for the next new “thing” that will be talked about and talked about … until the next new “thing” is shat out of the White House. I’m getting tired of this game.
Because It Is Not A Game. I believe a country that lets war criminals walk free – that country will allow anything.
In a good horror film the dread and suspense builds and builds until finally … The Door is opened … and we see whatever lurks at the threshold. The audience doesn’t scream at whatever was behind The Door … the audience screams to release the tension that was building until The Door was opened. As Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, “Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a tenfoot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible,” the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.“”
But this is Real Life. The Door was flung open and we all saw what was behind it. And it wasn’t an actor wearing makeup. It was unimaginably worse.
Because the “anything” this country allows now is this:
In October 2018, CNN reported there were 13,000 migrant children held in detention camps across the US.
In January 2019, Barbara Crossette writing for PassBlue.com, an independent, women-led journalism site about women’s issues, human rights, peacekeeping and other urgent global matters, said simply, “How Many Immigrant Children Is the US Detaining? Nobody Knows.“
The weeping of children separated from their parents will go on and on and on and on. The agony of their parents will never end. When will that final line be crossed? What atrocity will have to happen that will make Americans say “Enough.”
Remember …
For every atrocity that is allowed … The Donor Class says, “More.”
