The Donkey and the Hippopotamus

I think I am going to side with Republicans on this one. Mais pourquoi ? Because let us hew to the law of least hypocrisy. If we are going to conduct a show trial, let's conduct a show trial. Regrettably, the Obama administration seems firmly dedicated to the rule that if it can be half-assed, it must be half-assed.

Leave aside the fact that these decisions are pure whim and fancy, based on no discernible principle. Leave aside the Attorney General's boilerplate prosecutorial insistence that a conviction with the maximum sentence is not only desirably, but inevitable. Leave aside all the back and forth about who will or will not have the opportunity to grandsand at trial, whatever form that trial takes. Concentrate instead on the Obama régime's ludicrous insistence that it carry through with a legal process whose outcome has no relevance except insofar as it could provide a superficial rationale for killing the defendant. That's what's at stake; it's all that's at stake. For all its insane bluster and hubris, our government is not comfortable simply putting the guy against a wall and shooting him. So. We go to trial. If convicted and sentenced to anything less than death, he will be imprisoned forever. If acquitted and not sentenced, he will be imprisoned forever. But if sentenced to death, well, see you at the party!

The Bush people appear almost admirable by comparison. Their military tribunals got bogged in a morass of internal power struggles and legal quibbling, but no one in that administration pretended that tribunals were anything other than what they were: an administrative sentencing process for the presumed guilty. Now that is a travesty, but at least it's a honest travesty, and certainly not without historic precedent in this and other countries. Indeed, one might even call it the civilized norm in the broad sweep of history. Meanwhile, in the present, we must endure the endless invocation of justice from those who would traduce the most basic, fundamental principles of legal due process even as they extol them.