The problem with Democrats is that they will sit still for Alberto Gonzales to treat them like idiots, to lie and obstruct like this, and they won't then dial up the then-President and tell him, "Good luck getting any more nominees through the Senate for any position until you fire that asshole."
Of course, that problem continues with the tiny parliamentary reforms now before the Senate.
It's a puzzle that the Bushists haven't taken care of Alberto Gonzales better than letting him work a public job in support of affirmative action! Usually they're very attentive to keeping their own fat and happy.
It's a good thing he's not teaching Constitutional law, anyway.
Salon summarizes the case for some domestic high-value detainees. No, not a case for torturing them, only the case for detaining them.
Paul Krugman is looking for a word to capture what self-involved narcissistic dipshits with a breathtaking lack of the slightest bit of perspective completely lack.
Atrios would call them wankers, but that wouldn't conform to the New York Times style guide.
In this case, Mukasey is trying to create the presumption of good faith on the part of John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jay Bybee, William J. Haynes, et al. They were just advocating what they thought was legal for their client, the quivering cowardly mass of abject Bushists.
Yeah, sure.
They were rationalizing torture with creative legalisms that they knew were wrong.
Gonzo scot-free:
If someone would just claim that he stuffed them down his tighty-whiteys, then we'd have a story.The papers in question were so sensitive they were to be kept in the Justice Department Command Center.
The report says Gonzales violated the rules for handling top-secret information hours after he was briefed on the strict procedures for handling the documents.
"Despite this briefing, the attorney general took the notes home with him in his briefcase that evening and did not store them in a safe at his residence," the report said. (emphasis added)
Among Alberto Gonzales's crimes, mishandling sensitive compartmentalized information related to illegal spying is relatively minor. Even so, should a Democrat do it, he would rightly be punished, though not drawn and quartered, as the frothing wingnuts wanted for Sandy Berger.
Of course, Gonzo's defense remains that he's an idiot with premature senile dementia:
[T]he attorney general was merely forgetful or unaware of the proper way to handle the top secret papers.and then:
Gonzales' "best recollection is that he always placed the notes in the most secure place over which he had immediate personal control."
Many people have written about the Fourth Amendment and privacy implications of the NSA's communications surveillance and data-mining. And Congress actually showed some backbone on this in 2003 by passing recission of Total Information Awareness - or Terrorist Information Awareness, as the Bushists had deceptively rebranded it.
The law couldn't be more clear (my emphasis):
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United StatesDuhbya and Darth and their minions have arrogated to break the fundamental expression of democracy and to spend money specifically prohibited by law.
Mukasey says he can't investigate something that John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales excused in memos that transparently excused criminal behavior because they were written on Department of Justice letterhead.
I mean, seriously, I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo, and there's nothing in its persecution of Edmond Dantès that is so abusively unjust.
Chuck Schumer must be sooo proud.
A friend writes:
Seems like your kind of book...
THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA by Ronald Brownstein. A veteran political reporter provides a shrewd election-year assessment of the growing partisanship in American politics, looking at the roots of this polarization and its alarming consequences for the country at large.
There is no real controversy about whether waterboarding is torture. It is now when Americans do it, and it was when the Nazis, the communist Chinese, the Viet Cong, and the Soviets did it. It even was during the Inquisition, but the New York Times still says:
To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.Duhbya and Rummy (with Darth Cheney in the dark shadows) authorized waterboarding, among other tortures. There's no doubt about it. They had everyone ask mother-may-I from Rummy. They even had Gonzo and John Yoo write down their transparently bullshit rationales that add up to two giggle-provoking assertions newer before imagined to be plausible in American law:
When a Republican says, "I don't recall," he's almost always hiding something.
(Click the cel to visit Salon for the whole strip. Hat tip Crooks & Liars.)
Can anyone still believe that the White House was not involved in destruction of recordings of torture? No one who isn't in the middle of a do-it-yourself colonscopy.
Basically, this story describes Bandini, Lambert, & Locke negotiating with the CIA. Addington, Gonzales, and Miers were all involved. You know which direction the orders were travelling, even if they might have been in the form of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Update: Really from the New York Times, which finally lays out the prisoners' legal rationale for including these non-Guantánamo interrogation tapes in the order about Gitmo prisoners: al Zubaydah may have implicated them during torture.
Tattered remnants of Josh Bolten's Labor Day deadline to follow the rest of the Norway rats (Rove, Gonzo, ...). The AP lives Memento every day but doesn't take notes. Or maybe it doesn't read them. Whatever.
Al Hubbard worked on Social Security, SCHIP, global warming, and a proposal I had not previously heard about to tax health insurance benefits. Yeah, that's good for the middle and working classes. Good riddance!
Yeah, Michael Mukasey could always waterboard the U.S. Attorneys to find out what happened under Gonzo.
But he'll never touch Karl Rove, you can take that to the bank.
It's obvious that my parents saddled me with an unamerican moral when they read me The Emperor's New Clothes. Those pinko-leftist-commies (oops, Ten Commandment violation) told me that the loud-mouthed boy was the hero, when in fact he was the villain. No society should have to tolerate a mere boy savagely violating the community's values by speaking up against his royal elders and betters.
No, I'm not thinking of Graeme Frost and SCHIP, though I could be. Where did that little twerp get off taking government help and then not keeping quiet about it? He's one of those people who will take your money and then has the cheek to disagree with the President's valiant attempt to keep other children from the forcible imposition on them of health care that could damage their (and our) God-given free market.
I'm thinking of Jimmy Carter, a loud-mouthed ex-President, who repeats to us what his lyin' eyes tell him about torture, and this is treated as news by the lib'rul media. A society that valued Republicans would not regard this assertion as printable:
But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don't violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them.Can you imagine the gall of the man! It's like President Duhbya says: We're Americans. We couldn't possibly do anything wrong; God wouldn't let us. Nothing we actually do could possibly be torture, no matter what's in Jimmy's dictionary - did he get it from France? We do all that stuff in the Yoo memo that Gonzo signed off on and all the stuff that Rummy wanted to do, but there's still quite a bit left that Darth Cheney wants to do. And even that wouldn't be torture.
I'll be interested to read this whole article sometime outside working hours, but the first page is replete with what's wrong with our political culture.
An elite insider (from Harvard no less) resigns in protest but doesn't say anything in public that could actually raise the issues he supposedly cares about.
After leaving the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith was uncertain about what, if anything, he should say publicly about his resignation. His silence came to be widely misinterpreted.Whose fault was that? Instead, he waits four years and then publishes a book that whitewashes his own role in the finlandization of Congress.
While at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.”Yeah, just like Nuremberg. Look, it's pretty simple, Goldsmith: Those memos you "fought against" were put into practice by the Gonzo, Rummy, and Duhbya at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the black sites, and no doubt many other locations. You had a moral obligation to speak out against this, and you didn't.
When I asked whether he thought Gonzales should have resigned and whether Addington should follow, he demurred. “I was friends with Gonzales and feel very sorry for him,” he said. “We got along really well. I admired and respected Addington, even when I thought his judgment was crazy. They thought they were doing the right thing.”They couldn't possibly be war criminals. I like them!
Who will Duhbya nominate to replace Gonzo? Nobody knows, but reporters are desperate to tell us. After yesterday's Chertoff embarrassment, the AP finds its best Time above-it-all shrugging tone, but Mooney is still willing to transcribe what any unnamed Republican source says. Really, the rule should be: You want to float a name? You have to go on record. Otherwise, the reporter is just collecting guesses and bullshit and feeding it to us.
One particular paragraph cracked me up:
Other potential prospects include former Solicitor General Ted Olson, a GOP stalwart who argued Bush's case before the Supreme Court in the 2000 Florida recountUh, no. That smarmy SOB will never get Senate confirmation as long as any Democrat has even one ball. (Oh, shit.)
Time expects us to swallow the Bushist spin they regurgitate to "explain" why Gonzo resigned now. First, there's the sweet photo op of lunch with Duhbya and Laura. I wonder: do they get a second, fresh serving after the photographers are shooed away?
Then, there's the Josh Bolten deadline myth again. Why's the weather so nice in August? Josh Bolten told it that it had to leave now or stay until 2009. When senior White House aides jet off to cushy lobbying jobs next year, ya think we'll hear about Josh's deadline then. Tut-tut, how can Condi leave now? Suuure.
The story does quote Pat Leahy and Nancy Pelosi, posing their quotes as rebuttal to unnamed Republican sources who fear those nasty Dems will politicize the confirmation process. But the quotes are just boilerplate and, let me tell you, did not originate in response to the quote they are juxtaposed to.
In short, the Time story is almost pure Republican spin.
Gonzo was no longer a firewall. In light of the Kuttner plan, his continued inflammable presence among the Bushists had become a danger to Duhbya, however unfortunately remote. They must have decided that they needed a fire break instead of a firewall.
That means they fear a wildfire the most. I say, burn, baby, burn.
