The need for a Trump Truth and Reconciliation Committee to explain the breadth of the wrongdoing and only consider the possibility of accountability was a popular refrain in the run-up to the November election. But since election day, the volume of those calls has dropped dramatically. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested in November that the time for accountability was near, her comments met with concern. Politico broke the fourth wall in a supposedly non-editorial piece to claim that Trump et al. Being prosecuted for her astounding violation of the law was "hardly a healthy sign in any democracy," while an anonymous White House official was quoted on the subject of accountability: "It should definitely scare the American people more than scare me. That kind of rhetoric is terrifying. "
That's kind of the message that comes from many liberals too. After rubbing off various types of truth and reconciliation commissions in a recent column for The Washington Post (Post-war, post-genocide, post-slavery, post-Nazi) historian Jill Lepore decides that “(n) one of the terms of a truth and reconciliation commission is for Trump's four years in the White House” and “whatever the needs of the nation are pretty much in desperate need of self-reflection "before deciding that" history, not the partisans, is prosecuting Trump. " But if history has taught us anything, history leads to extremely weak law enforcement. Self-reflection is an antidote to bad behavior only in mild preschools. (…)
Three more articles worth reading
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QUOTE
“At this time of year, darkness is a more haunting thing than cold. The days are as short as any dream. " ~~E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White (1977)
TWEET OF THE DAY
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Fifty years ago today, @EPA was created to protect our environment, hold polluters accountable and protect public health. As climate change continues to threaten our planet, it is important that we restore #PA and take urgent action together to resolve this crisis.
– Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) December 2, 2020
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos that day in 2008—EPA explains Open Season on Mountains:
As if threatened, the positively useless Bush environmental agency has repealed important parts of the Stream Buffer Act. Previously, the EPA had worked with companies to undermine the law, but judges in some districts were still slowing approving measures to remove mountain tops. Now even this token barrier has been removed.
Approval from the EPA and the White House Bureau of Administration and Budget paved the way for Home Office officials to finalize industry-sponsored changes to the 25-year-old "buffer zone" rule for streams.
Environmental groups had fought the change in the hope that either judicial action or action by the new Obama administration could use the buffer zone as an instrument to tighter regulation of mountain peak removal.
Despite the destruction of more than 400 mountains and the routine violation of existing rules, the Bush administration has passed this gift on to the worst operators in the coal industry. In doing so, they fulfilled one of the dreams that Bush has had since he took office.
