Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Read Online Free PDF

hear me out. I’d like to give Congress a year off. That’s right. One year. I’d send them to a quiet place where they wouldn’t be distracted—maybe a nice convention center on Lake Michigan. And I’d tell them, “For the next year your job is NOT to pass any new laws or spend any new money. Your job is to evaluate what you’ve already done. Take each one of the hundreds of bills you’ve passed in the last three years, and show where it’s working. And if it’s not working, pull the plug on it.
    “Don’t worry about being away from Washington for a year. Most people won’t even know you’re gone. We’ll have someone answer the phones and take messages. We’ll call you if anything really urgent comes up.” But come to think of it, what could be more urgent than figuring out how to run a country that works?

IV
     

Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?
     
    I ’ve had a new word added to my vocabulary. The word is waterboarding. I kind of wish I’d never heard of it. No, it’s not a new sport. It’s a method of torture that involves dunking a prisoner underwater until he almost drowns, then pulling him up for air—and repeating the process until he talks. It can give you nightmares if you spend too much time thinking about methods of torture. But what really gives me nightmares is finding out that the United States is the one doing the torturing.
    Hey, aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?
    Look, I’m not naïve. I know war is hell. As General George Patton used to remind his troops during World War II, war is about killing. It’s bloody. But even in war, our nation has always chosen to uphold a certain moral code. We have declared that we are not going to become the evil we are fighting. I’d like someone to explain to me how torturing prisoners has become the American way.
    And don’t try to sell me that line of bull about how September 11 changed the rules of the game. September 11 was a horrible day. It was an act of unimaginable evil. But I just don’t buy it that because a group of terrorists attacked us on September 11, we’re suddenly justified in torturing people. I don’t buy it that it’s patriotic to pull people off the street and hold them indefinitely—and maybe forever —without even having to tell them why. Or ship them off to secret prisons in Eastern Europe. That might be worse than torture.
    It’s pretty sad to think we’ve come to this point. It makes you nostalgic for the leaders of the past.
    I can still remember how things were right after we defeated the Nazis in World War II. We had captured some of Hitler’s top henchmen, and everyone was wondering what we were going to do with them. These were guys who had ordered the murder of millions of innocent people in concentration camps. These were guys who had conducted cruel medical experiments on little children. They were evil, in the truest sense of the word. A lot of people thought we should just line them up and shoot them, or turn them over to the concentration camp survivors and let them be torn apart. Emotions ran pretty high. Would anyone really have objected to torturing those sons of bitches? I doubt it. But we had leaders then who reminded us of our higher ideals. Winston Churchill and Harry Truman insisted on holding the Nuremberg Trials. Think about it. We took the worst criminals of our times and we put them in a court of law. We gave them lawyers. We didn’t become the evil we were fighting.
    I also remember a few years later when the United States signed on to the Geneva Conventions. Who were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Geneva Conventions? Well, it might surprise you to know that they were two great military heroes—General Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower. You wouldn’t call them pansies or bleeding hearts. They were speaking from experience. They’d seen how American soldiers were tortured and murdered in Japanese prison camps. The Geneva Conventions were meant to