Vengeance and Justice will be mine? July 29, 2008

Why am I so enraged by the deeds of the Bush administration – beyond the obvious reasons? Why does it bother me so much that no one gets punished for their misdeeds, lies and abuses of power? I am not ashamed to say I want vengeance.

I happened across a great article in today’s NYTimes by Patricia Cohen – called, Calculating the Economics of an Eye for an Eye “Vengeance: it is as old as humanity, as natural as blinking. It has been examined and pondered by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, poets, playwrights and even primatologists, who have recently found that chimpanzees will punish thieves by overturning their food tables so they cannot enjoy the fruits of their crime.” Economnists have recently tried to measure vengeance in real world terms. It turns out that personal attributes — age, income, gender — as well as the characteristics of one’s culture and country contribute to a person’s desire for revenge, Mr. Mocan said. “A feeling such as vengeance,” he said, “which can be considered primal, is nonetheless influenced by the economic and social circumstances of the person and the country he or she lives in.”

–  Okay – so will vengeance be mine in the not so shocking discovery yesterday that the  (In)Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales routinely violated federal hiring laws by using politics, sexual preference and other illegal criteria to replace qualifications?  The report found that qualified candidates for jobs were rejected because a spouse was involved in Democratic politics or because either the candidate or a candidate’s wife was believed to be a lesbian. The report is a damning indictment of a Justice Department destroyed internally by political motives with no regard to laws. So will anyone go down for this? Not if AG Mukasey has anything to say about it (and he does).  Chances are not good.  Keith talks to Jonathan Turley about this development.

–  Ted Stevens, the powerful Alaskan Senator, who believes the Internet(s) is a series of tubes has been indicted on seven counts of falsely reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in services he received from a company that helped renovate his home.

And for laughs because goodness knows we need them –

Here is something to make your head explode. Oliver Stone’s work in progress has a trailer. Does anyone know the address of the World Court in the Hague? AURGH!