The Left's Demonology of Vengeance

At the same time that Barack Obama's been presumptiously preparing his presidential transition team, the hard left forces of the nihilist left are sharpening their knives in preparation for a campaign of legal vengeance against the Bush administration's alleged record of war crimes in the battle against global terror.

Salon, for example, ran a piece earlier this week entitled "Exposing Bush's Historic Abuse of Power," which suggests the formation of a new "Church Commission" to investigate domestic surveillance in the Bush years (the article includes the obligatory Nazi Reichsadler pictured above).

Also, there's news this week that left-wing bloggers (and their allies on the Paulbot right) are mounting a program of electoral mobilization against Democrats who supported the FISA reform bill just passed in Congress. Leading the pack is Jane Hamsher, who has teamed with fringe libertarians to form a group called The Strange Bedfellows. The organization's goal is to promote an "accountability" campaign of legal recrimination against the administration's "lawless surveillance state."

One gets a good sense of how intense are the demands for extremist retribution in Matt Stoler's post, "Democratic Congressional Candidate Alan Grayson on Iraq Reckoning: 'We'll Put People in Prison'":

One of the most exciting candidates I've met this cycle is Alan Grayson, a high profile trial lawyer who has been suing defense contractors for fraud, and is now running for Florida's eighth district in central Florida. I spent some time with him at Netroots Nation, and took video. Usually I have to push candidates to become more aggressive, in Grayson's case, he pushed me. Grayson is part of a new crew of progressive professionals, people like Darcy Burner and Donna Edwards with a tremendous track record of success in fields other than politics who are crossing over into the progressive sector out of a sheer revulsion of where this country is headed. It's different than the civil rights era of liberalism and the single issue liberalism of the 1980s, much more fearless.

Because of his track record suing defense contractors, Grayson is completely uninterested and unintimidated by ridiculous arguments about secrecy and national security. He thinks that war crimes have been committed, that people need to be put in prison, and that we absolutely cannot let bygones be bygones with the 2000-2008 era.

That last section really sums it up.

For the nihilist left, few are putting a priority on improving the econony, rebuilding infrastruce, or exploring means toward American energy independence - some of the top issues facing the mass of rank-and-file Democratic Party voters. What's motivated the hard left hordes are subterranean questions of lawbreaking by the administration. The agenda of electing "agressive progressives" is code language for mounting a campaign of revenge against Republicans who are routinely alleged to have taken the country "recklessly toward war. Just this week Representitive Dennis Kucinich, a leader of antiwar contingent in Congress, held hearings on Capitol Hill to investigate the administration for "leading the country to war under false pretenses."

Recall that the Iraq war, of course, was launched under a bipartisan congressional mandate, but within months of the same Democrats in Congress - who supported America's goal to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction - turned around for cheap partisan purposes to advocate the craven withdrawal from Iraq, the abandonment of our troops, and the surrender to the forces of Islamist totalitarianism.

As for the legal case for war crimes, the issue's debateable, and establishing them as a top priority in 2009 would create a political circus. The administration might do well to prevent a massive witch hunt by issues blanket pardons before leaving office.

Of course, it's hard to see the left's push for criminal prosecutions as more than diabolical partisan revenge. These developments, indeed, are the natural consequence of the left's doctrine of hatred. The incessant calls for criminal prosecution against the Bush administration satisfies the radical left's psychological need for vengeance against the percieved slights of intellectual and political marginalization.

It's not enough to organize for a restoration of the public spirit in health care, transportation, or other areas of needed revitalization, under a possible Democratic administration. The modern ideological hatred of the secular left demands nothing short of a totalizing political persecution for the very democratically-legitimated conservative leaders who have run the run the country for the last seven years.