No Truth, No Consequences

No truth, no consequences

John Steinberg - Raw Story Columnist
Published: March 13, 2006

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One of the more unusual places I have visited in my travels is Rotorua, on the north island of New Zealand. The area sits directly over the Pacific ring of fire, which manifests in this spot with geothermal activity in the form of hot mineral springs, geysers, and bubbling mud. When I first arrived near sunset, the stench of sulfur in the air was overpowering. Yet by the time I awoke the next morning, my brain had somehow accepted the smell of decay as part of the normal background, and I no longer noticed it at all.

Though I have not personally visited such a place here in the United States, I am certain they exist. Such as, for example, the Bush Administration. A newcomer would likely be quickly overcome by the lies that spew forth continuously like the malodorous emanations from a Rotorua geyser. The fact that so many in Washington seem to continue to live with the pervasive stench supports the notion that people can get used to just about anything.

How else can we explain the reaction to the latest chapter in the book of Republican Revelations? The recently surfaced video that that shows unequivocally that George Bush was warned of the likelihood of the failure of New Orleans' levees just days before it happened ought to unleash a hurricane of criticism.

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As has been chronicled ad infinitum, Dubya's life has been incredibly deficient in the corrective and formative effects of negative consequences. His presidency has been a microcosm of that fact, and its sequelae.

Journalism professor Mark Danner has written of our current state of frozen scandal --

"so-called scandals, that is, in which we have revelation but not a true investigation or punishment: scandals we are forced to live with. A story is told the first time but hardly acknowledged …, largely because the broader story the government is telling drowns it out. When the story is later confirmed by official documents, (such as) the Downing Street memorandum, the documents are largely dismissed because they contain 'nothing new.'"

In a recent interview, he explained:

"Before, you had, as Step 1, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step 2 would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra and others. And finally, Step 3 would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, Look, we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows."

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