Digby has posted the full text of David Broder’s April 26 piece called, “Stop Scapegoating.” It is an appalling argument, one Glenn Greenwald has rightly called “a tour de force of Beltway sickness – even for him.” Here is a representative excerpt from Broder’s response to calls for investigations into those who justified and ordered torture:
. . . now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps — or, at least, careers and reputations.
Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability — and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.
The “voters” to Broder are those over-emotional filthy masses who cannot see reason and will erupt into violence at any moment. They want vengeance, you see. Not justice. What justice would it be to make our political class accountable for their grotesque crimes?
Broder has a long history of making such specious arguments on behalf of the powerful. As Digby shows, Broder was defending Richard Nixon in 1969 against those miscreants who wanted to “break the President.”
This, bizarrely, is how Broder then described the anti-war movement:
There is . . . a vital distinction . . . to be made between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent, aimed at changing national policy, and mass movements aimed at breaking the President by destroying his capacity to lead the nation or to represent it at the bargaining table.
Anyone familiar with Doonesbury will remember the anti-Vietnam war student, “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer, who threatened the Establishment with protests, the occupation of the university president’s building, and the like. Thirty years later, Slackmeyer has yet another kind of establishment to contend with.
Slackmeyer Returns
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Presumptuous Insect 