Reading notes

There will never be justice, or healing, or peace in this land world — or any effective response to terror — until people like Karl Rove are out of power. Their fruits, their lifetime of actions, are a pattern of defending injustice, sowing discord, ensuring division and strife. They stir up shitstorms out of habit, meaning hardly anyone can see through the day-to-day murk, meaning that collectively we’re flying blind.

When they’re preternaturally effective at doing this, as Rove is, that suggests to me we’re facing a deep-rooted, far-reaching spiritual reality beneath the surface.

The nuts-and-bolts reality is as Prof. Juan Cole writes —

Whether the courts can and will punish Karl Rove for telling Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper that Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative should be beside the point. That’s for the courts to decide.

The real question is whether we want a person to occupy a high office in the White House when that person has cynically endangered US national security to take a petty sort of revenge on a whistleblower. …

The purpose of such punishment is always to bully and terrorize other employees, as well as to shut up the whistleblower. Since the Bush administration has done so many illegal things, if Washington insiders started blowing the whistle, there could be a hundred Watergates. …

What is the difference between Robert Hansen revealing key secret information for money to the Soviets and Karl Rove revealing it to the proliferators for political gain for the Republican Party and the Bush White House?

I want men and women of character, integrity, and accountability in my government. Is that a pipe dream? A first step toward that dream is excising from power [lawfully removing from office] ones without these characteristics.

Does anyone in the White House comprehend that actions have consequences? It’s a universal reality that no person and no nation can escape forever.

For many, many values of better, we can do better than this.

[via Melanie]