Or else she’s just too damn stupid. Just weeks after demanding that Caroline Kennedy be appointed to the U.S. Senate because it would a fairy tale come true, she’s saying that Ronald Reagan was right to pardon Mark Felt for conducting illegal bag jobs on Bill Ayers and his Weatherman pals and that, by extension, our present-day thugs in office (and out), notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George Bush, shouldn’t pay any penalty for their crimes.
As Marcus tells it “Felt and another former top FBI official, Edward S. Miller, authorized warrantless searches at the homes of friends and relatives of Weather Underground members in a desperate, and illegal, hunt for the whereabouts of the protesters they considered terrorists.” Ronnie pardoned Felt and Miller on the grounds that they were “two men who acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.” Reagan added that “"The record demonstrates that they acted not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.” And Marcus swallows this whole.
Ayers et al. were pathetic, self-important brats who committed crimes (on principle, no less) and should have been convicted for them. But their acts hardly constituted “terrorism that was threatening our nation,” so that was kind of a lie on Ronnie’s part. And to say that Felt and Miller acted without criminal intent because they were not interested in personal gain (except maybe a promotion or political advantage), well, that was a lie too.
Bizarrely, Marcus wants it elevated into a principle of law that any crime, even torture, is okay if a government official does it because he thought it was “right”. “What’s most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated,” she concludes. But these were crimes, not mistakes. And the way you prevent crimes from being repeated is to punish them. Here’s hoping that in the next round of layoffs at the Post, Ruth Marcus is the first to go.
