Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.

The party’s presidential candidate, who agreeably opposes impeaching Bush and Cheney and seems no more than mildly interested in examining the genesis of our sorrows should he and his party consolidate control of the two elective branches, has just come out foursquare in favor of expanding the reach of a government that already has its national security tentacles embedded in what should be some very uncomfortable places, and he has endorsed at least two Congressional figures—practicing war lover Joe Lieberman, who is receiving favorable mention as a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate, over the anti-occupation Ned Lamont in 2006, and reactionary Georgia representative John Barrow over his progressive primary opponent, Regina Thomas, this year—who represent the antithesis of Barack Obama’s watchwords, “hope” and “change”. To continue the cephalopod analogy, he seems fully sympathetic to the notion of redaction as a survival technique, if one takes “survival” to mean “convenience”.

Obama did not, however, lay the keystone of a national security state, or invade Iraq, or greenlight torture, or threaten to carpet bomb Iran, or minister to the armed forces with a sledgehammer, or weaken the economy to the point that it has become its own threat to our collective security, and neither did other Vichy Democrats such as Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and dozens of other administration enablers. They only helped; anything more than to shave their heads and shun them could be seen as an overreaction.

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