Without Fear or Favour

I spent five years in a private school, St. George's, with the above motto. I hated the place.

But I've always respected that motto, and it's something of a touchstone for me. When it comes time to decide what the right thing to do is, I often ask myself, "what would a man who has no fear and favors no one do in this situation?"

Discourse in the US is completely driven by fear and favour. The elite media fears to say anything that steps too far out of the conventional wisdom. They fear to call lies, that they know are lies, just that. They fear to piss off powerful people.

And they act with favour - they eat with the people they cover, they drink with them, they live with them, they sleep with them, they marry them and they went to school with them. The worst thing that ever happened to journalism is when it became a respectable profession - when ivy leaguers started taking it up in large numbers; when it became ok to invite a journalist to your cocktail party. When they stopped being scum to those they covered; when the distrust went away and turned into a coital dance of people who have a use for each other, favour crept in and has never left.

Likewise in politics it's all about fear and favor. The majority of Americans want universal health care. Have for years. It polls at 65%. But the bread of too many representatives and too many Senators is buttered by the health insurance industry, who have margins of 20 to 30 percent, so millions of Americans go without and many many thousands suffer and die - because the powerful in Washington favour those who give them money, and even those who don't fear the insurance lobby.

Fear of standing up and being counted after 9/11 - fear of calling the President and his lackeys on their lies, lead to the Iraq war and the deaths there. Every journalist who shilled for the war, explicitly or implicitly by refusing to ask hard questions or print unpleasant truths about the Bush administration's lies (the vast majority of which were debunked within days of being made, not years later, as people would like to pretend) is complicit in those deaths.

And then there are those like Judith Miller - corrupted by favour, by their lickspittle relationships with those in power. Through them raw propaganda; raw lies; were pumped into the discourse - so that, for example, the majority of Americans thought Iraq was behind 9/11 when there was no credible evidence that Iraq had anything to do with it.

These people are complicit in war crimes. They'll never be punished, and indeed most of them will never pay any price for it whatsoever, because the pack of journalists protects its own members from accountability. You have to really, really mess up to ever be punished for journalistic malpractice. (Hint: you can't yourself make things up, but you can report any lies anyone else says. And don't directly plagiarize - rewrite. It's not hard.)

The same is true of the vast majority of Senators who voted for the Iraq war resolution. They got steamrolled - either they were blindingly stupid and incompetent or they made a political calculation that Bush was riding high and it wasn't worth opposing him - or if Republican, that they had to support their party's president. The price of their political calculation? About 500K dead Iraqis, 3K dead American soldiers, and about 20,000 permanently injured American soldiers.

And rising.

That's a hell of a price for other people to pay for their spinelessness or incompetence.

Lately there's been an argument on this blog, and others, both about impeachment for Bush and about Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon. As Woodward found out (hat tip Corrente), it turns out Ford didn't pardon Nixon because of some desire for "healing", he did it because Nixon was his friend:

“I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill,” Ford said during the 2005 interview.

“I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma,” Ford said in the interview.

That acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford’s previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes. In earlier statements, Ford had emphasized the decision as an effort to move the country beyond the partisan divisions of the Watergate era, playing down the personal dimension.

In other words, Gerald Ford acted based on favour - Nixon was his friend, he helped out his friend.

Without Fear and Favour. What this implies is simple - the rules, the laws, apply to everyone evenly. There can be no justice, no fairness in the world, if those who are powerful get away with crimes and self-dealing because we are afraid to tackle them. There can be no fairness if we are unwilling to apply the same rules to those we like as we are to those we hate. (What did Saddam do, really, in terms of war crimes that George Bush has not? Use chemical weapons? I'm sure Bush's victims are just as dead from his illegal war as Saddam's are from his invasion of Iran.)

None of this says there is no place for mercy. But there should always be less place for mercy for the powerful than for the weak. To those whom great responsibilities and great privilege is given, much should be demanded. It is exactly those men who have the right to take a nation to war; have the power to make end runs around the constitution; who have the favour of other powerful men and women, who must be held most strictly to account.

It is truly sickening to me to hear, in a nation like the US, which has locked up more people than China and Russia; that forgiveness for the powerful is the order of the day, while hundreds of thousands rot in jail for minor offenses such as non-violent drug offenses.

It is truly saddening to hear that many "liberals" think that trying to pass some veto bait bills for Bush is more important than trying to stop a mass murderer like Bush from killing even more people. It is truly beyond contemptible to hear people saying that Bush should be forgiven for killing half a million people by taking the country to war based on a lie; should be let off from having authorized torture; should be allowed to retire to his ranch after shredding the constitution.

"Oh, he killed half a million people, and is still killing people, but there are so many more important things we could do than try to convict him of his crimes."

That's the moral - or rather immoral, language that I keep hearing from far too many Americans.

That's the message - that no laws, no justice, no discipline will be enforced upon America's elites. That those who break the law at the highest ranks of government, whether under Nixon, in Iran/Contra or under Bush, should never be held responsible, with real legal sanction, for what they did.

The great ages of nations end when they are no longer able to even pretend to strive towards their own ideals. That, today, describes America. And the fact that even many relatively sane Americans can no longer see why justice matters, why responsibility is necessary, why you can't act out of fear or favor - is the main reason why the smart money isn't on the US being the major power of the middle 21st century.