Let bygones be bygones?

Not

Not, according to Dennis Kucinich anyway. Via A Tiny Revolution, here is a post-election interview with Rep. Kucinich. In comments about the falsehoods leading to the Iraq war, Dennis says clearly what I have felt for a long time, ``...we cannot heal America if we continue with policies that are based on lies.''

Dennis calls for what would be a Truth Commission: ``We need to have hearings on Iraq again. We need to go over again why we went there.... We'’ll never be able to bring closure to this Iraq matter unless we tell the truth about what happened.''

It is impossible to have a meaningful discourse on Iraq if nobody wants to look back on how we got there. Without a basis in truth, we're forced into accepting Bush's outrageous conception of a noble project that is making us safer and leading to ``freedom'' for the Iraqis.

No help in this direction will come from the Democrats, not without a lot of public pressure anyway. Impeachment is ``off the table'' according to Nancy Pelosi. Other top Democrats, like Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Chuck Shumer, are getting well-practiced saying things like we need to be ``moving forward on an agenda, finding things that we can agree on to start off on the right foot'', and, ``The only way to move forward is with bipartisanship and openness, and to get some results....and that's what we're going to do'', and, ``If we are seen as just blocking the president, it will not serve us well in 2008.''

Fine, if all we expect is business as usual with a slight adjustment in who is holding the gavel. But business as usual is not enough any more. What has happened in Iraq is a really, really big transgression, of global-historical scale, committed by corrupt and morally bankrupt American leaders guilty of the supreme crime--a Crime Against Peace. This enterprise will bankrupt all of our souls if we let the Democrats keep the door open for the president's agenda without examining this hard truth.