A high ranking Republican senator says that AIG executives should consider suicide in the time-honored tradition of the Japanese Samurai. Why? Because they have dishonored themselves by the damage they have done not only to their parent corporation but to the country and the world economy. Maybe Sen. Grassley was engaged in some hyperbolic rhetoric, but we all know what he was getting at, and why. What’s lacking is a sense of shame and a sense of honor. Who destroys the lives of millions and then accepts a million dollar bonus for their efforts?
But the AIG executives are very small potatoes compared to the elites that ran this country from 2001-2009. Whatever damage the AIG execs did to the world, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did ten-fold…maybe a thousand-fold. That’s why I find it so hard to understand why the press is defending Dick Cheney against slights against his dignity and character. It’s okay for a sitting senator to suggest that some anonymous insurance executive slash his wrists in the bathtub, but let the president’s press secretary dismiss the dignity of the former vice-president and suddenly protocol has been violated.
But Dick Cheney really should consider killing himself. If Senator Chuck Grassley had said as much, I wouldn’t bat an eye. By any standard, including the Roman or the Japanese, a statesman that had presided over such a string of epic failures as Dick Cheney would feel duty-bound to plunge a sword into his abdomen and move the sword left to right in a slicing motion until he was dead. The man is guilty of war crimes. And even the legal decisions that he made ended in unmitigated disaster.
Maybe the country isn’t ready to impose justice on the Bush administration for all the hardships they created, but that should not prevent members of the Bush administration from administering their own justice on themselves. Doesn’t honor almost require it? To think that members of the press would take offense at the present administration’s refusal to show deference and respect to the prior one!!
Okay, I understand that American culture frowns on suicide. We do not have the same culture as the Romans and the Samurai. That is probably a good thing. But can’t we reserve some of the vitriol we’re leveling at Wall Street for the people that we’re actually in charge for the last eight years? Is that asking too much?