If it’s you, that is. Clinton could still take the marbles, and other than having to sit through four years worth of the Republican Hate Machine, I’m okay with that.
But … there will come a time early on in your administration when you’re tempted to say “Let’s move on. Let’s put this whole sordid business behind us and get on with the nation’s important business.”
I hope you won’t do that. Because the nation’s important business, after 8 years of Bush and Friends doing just about everything they could to screw up America and suck billions of dollars out of it for themselves and their thief buddies, never mind anything else, IS the current mess, and the people who caused it.
I realize you have to work with Republicans, and that will be a good thing — they’re Americans, too, after all — but there are some people who should definitely not be able to just walk away free.
Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, for instance, should not be allowed to retire safe and rich and protected against what they’ve done to us. They just shouldn’t. If nothing else, the toll they’ve taken in respect for government, respect for your office, has to be addressed. Too many freedoms are eroded, too much respect is gone, too many people are dead.
I know you’ll be busier than anybody in the country with fixing what these people have screwed up, and I wish you success in all of it. But I hope you’ll take the time to set a precedent: “Nobody can’t get away with lies forever. Nobody gets a free ticket to rip the guts out of America.”
If you don’t, you become an enabler. One of them. And I’d hate that. In the eyes of many of us, it would instantly lessen the respect you need to do your job. If you let them get away with it all, you will instantly handicap yourself in doing the immense job you have to do in fixing all they’ve broken.
Nail the bastards. Put them in prison if you can, take away their billions, parade them on perp walks in the news, show us that they’re not visiting diplomats forever above Justice. If you destroy our ability to see you and all these others as people just like us, subject to the same laws, you destroy the heart of democracy.