All the Innocent Criminals

White collar crime seems to pay. At least for the privileged few. The number of crooks that get away with their crimes seems to rise exponentially with the money in their bank accounts. Madoff struts around in his suit as if he's someone important, and you know what? He is. He is because he owes FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS  to the investors he bilked. Why is he not in jail? Because with that kind of money comes influence. The kind of influence in the corridors of power that we little people can't see. The justice system is so slow and corrupted that by the time Madoff comes to trial, the millions he has will be hidden far away, and all the people he swindled will maybe see a few pennies on the dollar. If he does end up in the slammer, my bet is that it's a country club, and he won't have a cellmate named Bubba to hang out with when the lights go out. But one can always hope.

That particular slice of hell is too good for the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney, now making appearance after appearance justifying their myriad list of criminal acts of the past eight years. From orchestrating an illegal and unjustified war in the face of evidence to the contrary that they ignored, to the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, to killing more Americans in Iraq than Osama bin Laden killed in NYC on 9/11 - from waterboarding and worse (with all the talk about waterboarding, we're done a great job ignoring the OTHER things the CIA did to the prisoners in Gitmo before the photos got out), to outing a CIA agent wife of a critic, Bush/Cheney sport a litany of crimes that they now glibly defend and try to justify. Today at his last "presidential" (I refuse to capitalize the word in the context of discussing Bush) news conference, W said he was "disappointed" that no WMDs were found. "What? What? What was that?!?" the press corps should have said. "You're 'disappointed' that you went to war on this issue, disappointed that you ordered the deaths of thousands of people and injured hundreds of thousands more - - and all you can say is that you were 'disappointed'??!! 

In that context, all I can even think to say, is that I am sad that this man was in charge of our country for the past eight years. Very sad.