NEWS SAYS: REVOKE HIS MEDAL
Just before soberly yet searingly describing Bill Cosby’s crimes as rape, President Obama demurred that he could not strip the disgraced comedian of the Presidential Medal of Freedom he was awarded in 2002. “There’s no precedent for revoking a medal. We don’t have that mechanism,” said Obama.
A President who just got through touting what he describes as an unprecedented nuclear deal with Iran should have a little more creativity.
A previous occupant of the Oval Office created the nation’s highest civilian honor by presidential executive order. A second previous Oval Office occupant changed its terms. Neither envisioned that someone bearing such a high accolade could be a monster.
Now we know better. Now we know that a President must establish the power to call back the hardware.
In 1945, it was Harry Truman who established what was then the Medal of Freedom to honor civilian service during World War I.
In 1963, via Executive Order 11085, John F. Kennedy renamed the award the Presidential Medal of Freedom and decreed that it would be given “to any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
The order, in six sections, describes the process for nominating and selecting recipients.
Obama must now add a seventh section to be invoked in the event that a recipient has engaged in acts of moral turpitude, surely to include criminality that hurts someone.
A draft for Obama’s consideration: Commit rape; lose medal.
More than 25 women have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assaults, typically after he had drugged them. In a newly released sworn deposition from 2005, Cosby admitted to having secured Quaaludes with the intent of giving them to women with whom he wanted to have sex.
That was three years after President George W. Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Cosby for “appeal[ing] to the common humanity of his audience, rather than the differences that might divide it.”
Wednesday, in answer to a question, Obama cited a policy of not convicting individuals from the presidential podium, then declared:
“If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape. And I think this country, any civilized country, should have no tolerance for rape.”
Revoke the medal, Mr. President. You have the conscience. You have the power.