10-13-2022, 07:41 PM
(10-13-2022, 06:45 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: It's not generally supposed to be easy to indict the previous commander and chief. In many parts of the world, immediately going after the country's former leader is business as usual, and it stands to reason we'd want to make that difficult.
Investigating, indicting, or trying the loser of the previous election should bring us the chills. Partisan politics should never have vindictive revenge as an objective. The winners of an election who prosecute the losers of the previous election simply for being in the opposition almost certainly kill democracy in the process. That's how Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier did things in Haiti under a regime that rivaled Castro's Cuba for a lack of freedom.
We should reasonably expect our elected officials to obey the law. Does anyone have any question of that? Our politicians are not exempt from laws against treachery, bribery, or embezzlement, let alone certain crimes that the Founding fathers could never imagine of their own committing -- like murder That we tried German and Japanese top officials for horrific crimes makes clear that we would not tolerate such by our own top civilian or military leaders. OK, Trump did not invade other countries, commit genocide, or impose slavery.
I can see plenty of offenses suitable for prosecution. He put Members of Congress, their staffs, news crews, and Capitol police or any other responding police at extreme and undue risk of injury and death. He even put the Vice-President of the United States at risk of outright murder! He stirred up a violent mob. He tried to induce officials in some states to commit a crime, to wit forgery, to supply him fraudulent votes that would have flipped the state in question; because he used a telephone he may have committed one of the easiest crimes that can be proved: wire fraud.
I would never endorse a trial of an ex-President for specious or trivial offenses. Everybody does something wrong on occasion. I expect every politician to lie and cheat if necessary to get re-elected, and those who do the least of that are veritable saints. By some standards the killings of Qusay and Uday Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri are extrajudicial killings. I excuse all five killings and I would accept any other country doing exactly the same under the same circumstances without fault of the national entity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.