MoveOn's shocking retreat from the battlefield

I'm not a joiner. I'd like to think that's because of an Emersonian rather than Groucho Marxian impulse: it's true I'd want nothing to do with any group that would have me as a member, but on the other hand, groups, by definition, have a disagreeable tendency toward Group Think.

The results of their herd mentality are also horrifically predictable. Usually. But on occasion they do surprise, and that is precisely what MoveOn's membership did last week.

As the Politico reports, it was then that "the group’s members chose their top four priorities for the organization, winnowed down from a top-10 list culled from 50,000 suggestions." And here is what they chose:

"Universal health care; economic recovery and job creation; building a green economy/stopping climate change; and end[ing] the war in Iraq."

All perfectly sensible targets, for sure. It is, however, that which failed to make the final cut that surprised me to the point of shock: "holding the Bush administration accountable."

Let me back up just a bit. I was shocked for only the briefest of time, for I quickly remembered that this was a group making these selections -- collectively arrived-at common denominators of idealistic baubles, bangles and beads. And what was so shiny yesterday is already a tarnished toy: accountability.

MoveOn's executive director, Eli Pariser, framed the democratic outcome in this way: He "says that this happy alignment with Barack Obama’s agenda -- and fortuitous absence of conflict with same -- comes in part because 'the people he’s listening to and the people we’re listening to are the same people.'"

The Politico framed it in another way: The Final Four of priorities "may be a sign that MoveOn’s members want to move ahead -- and that they’re willing to make some ideological sacrifices in exchange for real progress."

OK, somebody is fudging here, big time.

Group think -- the institutional disease which for years MoveOn spent considerable resources properly assailing -- is now a democratic virtue, according to, yep, MoveOn; and according to the Politico, sweeping aside, or under the rug, years of immensely impeachable, extraordinarily indictable high crimes and misdemeanors is little more than an "ideological sacrifice."

Just who's kidding who here? These are crimes we're talking about -- war crimes, Constitutional crimes, crimes against "the people," crimes against the world, crimes, simply put, against humanity. And it's a trifle more than an "ideological sacrifice" or democratic virtue to now neglect the prosecution of those crimes; indeed that would be an unpardonable crime itself.

I'm not suggesting we pursue some animalistic joy of revenge. In fact, revenge has nothing to do with it. This is national self-preservation I'm talking about. For if we permit the Bush administration's darkest luminaries to walk away legally unscathed, we are inviting more of the same. And that "more" will return to haunt us in exponential spades.

Roughly a year and a half ago Bill Moyers invited the Nation's liberal John Nichols and conservative attorney Bruce Fein onto his show. The result (transcript here) was perhaps the most riveting and critically important broadcast in the history of public television.

Said Nichols:

On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off [an executive] toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools. They don't give them up. The only way we take tools out of that box is if we sanction George Bush and Dick Cheney now and say the next president cannot govern as these men have….

We ought to be discussing impeachment … not because of George Bush and Dick Cheney but because we are establishing a presidency that does not respect the rule of law. And people, Americans, are rightly frightened by that. Their fear is the fear of the founders.

Said Fein:

[Bush] has claimed the authority to tell Congress they don't have any right to know what he's doing with relation to spying on American citizens, using that information in any way that he wants in contradiction to a federal statute called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He's claimed authority to say he can kidnap people, throw them into dungeons abroad, dump them out into Siberia without any political or legal accountability. These are standards that are totally anathema to a democratic society devoted to the rule of law….

[T]he founding fathers expected an executive to try to overreach and expected the executive would be hampered and curtailed by the legislative branch…. [Yet Congress has] basically renounced -- walked away from their responsibility to oversee and check…. And when you abandon that process, you abandon the ship of state basically and it's going to capsize.

None of that was vengeful or "ideological." It was, rather, profoundly pragmatic while faithfully Constitutional and forward-looking.

George W. Bush et al. paved the road to our destruction. If they are not held accountable, it is we who will have summoned our own demise.