When crooks walk free

Kudos to all the House Dems who stripped telecom immunity from the current bill. There's something very wrong with the country when organizations or individuals can, with government encouragement, ignore the U.S. Constitution with knowledge that someone will give them immunity after the fact. The fundamental notion of laws is that they provide guidance to the scope of proper individual or corporate behavior. In my opinion, even if the President and both houses agreed on immunity, they'd still be violating the will of the people as it was expressed in the laws founded by the elected representatives who were serving at the time of the infraction.

This muddleheaded thinking also takes its toll on law-enforcement. Who wants to spend months chasing down criminals who allowed the government to spy on US citizens after they get a phone call from some government stooge telling them that the entire investigation isn't going to matter anyway--the government's going to give the crooks a get-out-of-jail free card.

Of course, it comes as no surprise that most of the scrambling for immunity comes from the so-called "conservative" right. The only thing most of these people want to conserve is the right of the wealthy to do whatever they feel is right. All other "rights" are just pabulum for the masses. You can be sure that the "conservatives" snicker loudly as they sit in their hotel rooms with their thousand-dollar a night call girls and watch their working-class devotees on Fox News get watery eyes talking about family values, the importance of Constitutional rights (which, according to the Orwellian logic, can only be protected if we choose to ignore them), and the interests of the average Joe (who in the end, always ends up being some anonymous billionnaire). If we're going to be retroactive, let's strip Bush of his Presidential powers that he got eight years ago and declare all of his decisions null and void.