Kit Bond joined the GOP rhetorical offensive against the rule of law today, asserting on MSNBC
“… that those who want to have public hearings and show trials in the United States Congress… would be following tactics that are more appropriate for a banana republic,” replied Bond. “I don’t think the Obama administration wants to say the next time the Republicans get in control they will have show hearing-trials and try to institute criminal prosecutions against people who carried out orders of the Obama administration.”
Bond is evidently not one for making fine distinctions. Somebody should explain to him that calls to hold lawbreakers accountable do not involve mere policy differences or the triumphalism of a successful political putsch, but simple questions of law and justice — and, of course, if folks in the Obama administration break the law, they should all be held accountable.
Obama, after trying to shuffle away from the issue, seems to finally realize this fact, which is why he has made it clear that resolution of the legal questions must be left to the DOJ — without political interference from the White House. Why is it just Senator Bond and his Republican pals who have so much trouble with the concept of legal redress?
However, if Republicans like Senator Bond want to compare this call for justice to politics in banana republics, Josh Marshall offers an analogy that strikes me as vastly more apt:
In former Banana Republics, in their post-transition- to-democracy phases, you’ll often have a Junta Party. It’s an opposition party whose main goal isn’t to get elected so much as to maintain the legacy of the former junta regime, defend its record of service to the state and most of all keep its former leaders from being put on trial or shipped off to the Hague. Often the party will be headed up by the former Generals themselves. But if they’re dead or otherwise occupied in the slammer or abroad, maybe you’ll have their relatives or the one-time cronies and lickspittles of this or that el jefe of the old regime filling the leadership roles.
Sound like anyone we’ve heard opining on Bush & Co. law-breakers recently, Senator Bond?
These clowns are so obvious on a daily basis. “Kit” wasn’t the only one spouting the banana republic line today. If they could think for themselves they would be real dangerous.
although my sense of where I first heard it is fuzzy
to find new ways to remind everybody that Obama is Black. The Banana Republic thing conjures up jungle-like images–aren’t they the clever ones?