The Pig in the Parlor

Glenn Greenwald has a great post about what he calls the pig in the parlor and others have called the elephant in the room. It's the glaringly obvious thing that virtually none of the talking heads is talking about -- the President broke the law.

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law -- he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn't the case.

[...]

And thus, a Washington ruling class which reveled in subpoenas and criminal investigations over such towering matters as Whitewater, Vince Foster and Monica Lewkinsky has collectively decided that talk of criminality on the part of the President for how he is spying on Americans is imprudent and unserious.

[...]

Notwithstanding all of the professorial angst-ridden deliberations, the NSA scandal is and always has been extremely simple. Congress, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, passed a law 30 years ago making it a felony to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants and George Bush got caught violating that law -- a law nobody ever suggested was invalid until he got caught violating it. People who violate criminal laws are criminals, even if -- at least in the United States -- they hold high government positions. In decisive and unapologetic tones, Judge Taylor ruled -- consistent with the consensus of most legal experts -- that the President has been continuously breaking the law without any excuse, and that is something which our pundit and political classes simply want to ignore.

He then goes on to compare the behaviour about the NSA ruling to something I have written about before, the way the media (because of their own complicity) refuses to hold to account those who initiated and supported the fiasco in Iraq.

Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and on and on -- all of them treated by the national media as Important, Wise, Serious foreign policy figures despite their being fundamentally and recklessly wrong about virtually everything with regard to our Iraq disaster. The one thing which the permanent Washington class does not want is accountability -- not for tragic errors, not for lawbreaking -- because being held accountable is the one real threat to their fiefdoms.

Great post! The emperor has no clothes.