Pride Goeth...

The spectacular fall of the administration in just 16 months

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
3/25/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

“I am fully committed, as the administration's fully committed, to ensure that, with respect to every United States attorney position in this country, we will have a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed United States attorney.”

With those words, Alberto Gonzales on January 18th stepped firmly over the line between shadiness and outright criminality. He said them in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and yes, he was under oath when he said them. Of course, by then they had already appointed eight “interim” attorneys who, under the provisions of the Patriot Act, could serve indefinitely at the pleasure of the President without the little nicety of getting confirmation from the Senate. Just one of hundreds of little land mines in the Patriot Act, such as stripping habeas corpus from all aliens, registered or not, or any citizen whom the President deems to be “an enemy combatant.”

Kyle Sampson understood that someone would get wise to the obscure provision giving the President utter political control over the US attorneys, and wrote in a memo, “There is some risk that we’ll lose the authority, but if we don’t ever exercise it then what’s the point of having it?”

So: Gonzales was lying under oath, and there is prima facie evidence of it. Even Republican Senators are beginning to talk about impeachment, and not just of Gonzales. For example, an exchange of emails between Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ assistant, and chief West Wing political advisor Karl Rove makes Rove’s immediate involvement crystal clear.

He wrote a memo entitled “Re: Question from Karl Rove” and said, “As an operational matter we would like to replace 15-20 percent of the current U.S. attorneys – the underperforming ones ...The vast majority of U.S. attorneys, 80-85 percent I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc., etc.”

I haven’t bothered looking at the job description for a federal prosecutor, but trust me on this: being a “loyal Bushie” is not one of the job requirements. And Karl Rove’s job description doesn’t give him any involvement in naming US attorneys. Or having them fired for questionable reasons.

Gonzales also lied to the public on a separate matter, when he claimed that he had no involvement in the actual planning to fire the attorneys. Memos released Friday night make it abundantly clear that he chaired at least two of the meetings where those very plans were hammered out. Oops.

The admin has been frantic, along with the VRWC echo chamber at places like Faux and talk radio. They’ve been saying that “Clinton did the same thing” (he didn’t) and that it’s routine to fire attorneys for poor performance (it isn’t – the eight who were fired last year outnumbered the total fired by the previous three administrations, and unlike the others where there were some clear problems with professional behavior, the ones fired by Putsch generally had excellent records, with five of the eight in the top ten for securing convictions.

The media spin is backfiring. Republicans can no longer just let it die in committee the way they did in 2002, when the Bush admin fired another attorney: Fredrick Black, whose region included the Marianas. He had been investigating reports of slave labor and forced prostitution on the US “protectorate” (American slang for “colony”) and was already investigating Jack Abramoff, and ties to Republican Congressmen John Doolittle and Tom DeLay, when he was unexpectedly fired. Nothing the Dems could do about it; the Republican Congress certainly wasn’t going to investigate because they were too busy putting party ahead of country.

Now, without the shield of a puppet Congress, the admin is trying damage control that it has never had to concern itself with before. Both the House and Senate Judiciary committees have unanimously approved plans to issue subpoenas against Gonzales and Rove, and others. When Putsch muttered that he didn’t care about that, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel hinted darkly at impeachment, noting that the Congress had ways of dealing with Presidents who didn’t care.

Putsch tried renewing his offer to let members of his administration testify before Congress, provided that they weren’t under oath, the testimony was private, and there were no transcripts. It worked with the puppet Congress in 2003, when he was able to get them to accept non-oath “testimony” on 9/11 in secret. But that was a Republican Congress, and Republicans always put party before country.

This is a REAL Congress, and they weren’t noticeably amused when Putsch tried that “secret pseudo-testimony” dodge last week. This time, they were flat-out pissed, and even the lickspittles among the Republicans were beginning to shy away from the White House.

It’s a hard time for Republicans in Congress who have to deal with the White House. It’s a bit like a loyal dog who has been ordered to stay while his master commits suicide in front of him.

Harriet Miers is one of those the Congress will be calling on to testify. You may recall that she might have wound up on the Supine Court, and the only thing that prevented it was that, as a “loyal Bushie,” her effusiveness for Putsch, sounding for all the world like a love-struck schoolgirl, made her a laughingstock.

Clown she might be, but in the hidden recesses of the Putsch White House, she may well have been involved in some rather nasty efforts to subvert the Constitution, the powers of Congress, and the rights of the people.

Makes you wonder just what the two Putsch appointees to the SC who DID make it are going to be like. Are they judges, or just more “loyal Bushies” posing as judges?

For anyone who hasn’t noticed, we’re just about at the same point in the demise of this administration that we reached with Nixon and the Saturday Night Massacree.

In other words, there is still some time for this to all play out, but more and more, it looks like the Putsch junta is doomed.