Our Challenge with Bush’s Crimes: The Power of Accountability Coupled with Forgiveness

There needs to be an accounting for the crimes committed by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of their gang.

Appointing a Special Prosecutor to investigate these crimes, and to bring these people to justice, is #6 on the list of priorities that folks polled by the Obama Transition Team have declared is important to them.

Congress knuckled under to Bush’s bullying, corruption, and scare tactics. They didn’t hold our integrity as a nation strongly, as they are called to do. So Bush, as all despots will do, ran wild with his unbridled power. Two wars, billions in lost revenues, millions of dead, thousands of Americans dead, billions lost now to his bail-out buddies who stayed loyal to him in the business world, and who knows what else, are the legacy that Bush leaves us as a people.

We have lost a thriving economy. We have lost our future financial security, dumped into Bush’s oil fields and his pals’ pockets. We have lost our ability to look into the future and see where our children’s lives may lead, due to the insanity of his horrible domestic and foreign policies. We have lost our standing in the world as a democratic, fair-minded nation who is willing to help others in need. Instead, we are an indebted nation, with a failed economy based on millions of assets that were loans to people who could never afford the predatory mortgage increases they agreed to. And we are a feared country, a country that other nations do not respect.

In so many ways, Bush has trashed and looted our country, and is still doing so at the end of his reign of terror. 

He deserves to be held accountable for his crimes. Just like any other American would be.

It was so moving, and saddening, and uplifting to see the photos from around the world of ordinary people crying, laughing and celebrating at Barack Obama’s victory speech Election Evening. So many millions seeing the potential of a nation based in liberty, where all people are created equal, and everyone is endowed by her or his Creator with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Our pursuit as a nation of those tenets led us to Obama’s victory. And now, to the hard work ahead.

As we move to investigate the illegalities of Bush’s crimes against our country and against the world, we have to at the same time hold forgiveness in our hearts for him. Not to let him escape his accountability, because it is his due. But to make sure that we don’t slide into the morass of fear-based and hatred-based politics that he has led us in these past eight years.

His will go down as the worst presidency in our history. The most destructive of our rights, the most disgusting in the depth and breadth of corruption, and the worst in terms of the spirit of who we are as Americans toward each other, and out to the world. We have years of work ahead of us to repair Bush’s damage, and with President Obama leading that repair, I believe that we will do so, in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation, of goodwill and welcoming of those different than us, rather than hatred.

It is a challenging skill to both hold someone accountable, and forgive them at the same time. It doesn’t lessen their ability or need to make restitution and to pay for their crimes, and Bush has a mountain of criminal and immoral behavior to account for. What it does to forgive and hold him accountable is to continue a tradition that has been lost here in America under Bush’s horrendous regime: To trust justice to win out, in the end.

It is Bush’s end now. May justice prevail.