Shamed by Peru

It's been a couple of days, but it's not that there's nothing to write about; it's just that what used to be a buffet of outrages has become a suffocating cesspool of corruption, just too foul to approach. Things that used to shake a nation like ours seem only part of the background stench and hardly stand out as individual points of corruption any more. One remembers Richard Milhous Nixon, the man whose treachery caused him to flee Washington, as just another cheap crook and not much at all compared with the swashbucklers and scofflaws who now inhabit the White House and the Justice Department and the Courts - and nearly every other position of authority.

Yesterday, Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru was sentenced to 6 years in jail for abusing his presidential powers by ordering a warrantless search of the apartment of the wife of a corrupt official. He faces further charges that could add another 30 years to his tab, stemming from the deaths of suspected "terrorists" and the kidnapping of a journalist.

It wouldn't happen here. Kidnapping journalists and others, holding people incommunicado for years without charges, sometimes torturing them, perhaps allowing them to die in confinement - these things are standard procedures in Bushamerica, as are warrantless wiretappings, searches and other illegal intrusions into everyone's affairs. And of Course, Fujimori never started a war under false pretenses in which hundreds of thousands died, millions were rendered homeless and a country was reduced to ruins. Peru takes action, the United States or America puts on their iPods and mumbles about Jesus and homosexuals and looks to people like Mike Huckabee and his imaginary friend for leadership.

Ex President Jimmy Carter gave a speech back in May of 1974 after having read transcripts of Nixon's tapes:

"The Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be," he said. "I have read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former Attorney General who protected his boss and now brags of the fact that he tiptoed through a minefield and came out. . . . quote, clean, unquote. You know, I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a minefield on the technicalities of the law and then bragging about being clean afterwards. . ."

I don't have to use my imagination to picture the Bush administration safely cruising that same minefield with total disregard for any consequences in their armored tank called the Patriot Act. The law is what they want it to be; justice is what they say it is and the people do nothing but argue about Christmas and heretics and what the Wal-Mart greeters are saying this year. How sad it is that the country that once had some legitimate claim to holding up the torch of liberty for the world to see has to look to Peru as a lesson in the limits of government power.