Olbermann: Bush, Cheney should resign

“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

That—on this eve of the 4^th of July—is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words.  And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The man who said those 17 words—improbably enough—was the actor John Wayne.  And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them, when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon in 1960.

“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

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We enveloped our President in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected—indeed those who did not believe he had been elected—willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people,
a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that
the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers
and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.   

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but
sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people,
of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear,
the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace,
as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is
without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush,
of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame
Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel
and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation,
with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing,
as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming
an accessory to the obstruction of justice.