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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Squeaking Tumbrel Wheels out Abu Al's Window 

...on March 13, under oath, the Chief Law Enforcement Officer Of The United States said this under oath during testimony he was giving under oath in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to reporters about his involvement in the firing of U.S. Attorneys:

But that is, in essence, what I knew about the process. I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That's basically what I knew as the attorney general.
(ed. note: emphasis added

...oopsie daisy...

Darn those pesky Friday night document dumps. I'm absolutely positive that this surprising and unfortunately contradictory little revelation has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that - just hours earlier - his former henchman Kyle Sampson had agreed to come before the committee and potentially sing like a bird, playing John Dean to Al's Tricky Dick, perhaps contradicting Abu Al's insistence to the Congress of the United States and the American people that he was spending so much time managing the DOJ coffee fund. I mean, these guys promised to bring the highest ethical standards to government, so lying and cheating and obstructing justice would be the farthest thing from their mind, right?

Abu Al may survive this thing yet, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how. It also cuts the guts out of the stern insistence by Gee Dub and his mouthpieces that the "right" of executive privelige prevents Rove and Miz Harriet from testifying under oath. As Patrick Leahy has pretty plainly said, as has now been definitively proven, if the Senate can't even rely on the nation's Chief Law Enforcement Officer to get it straight in sworn testimony, a Senator would have to be crazy to allow unsworn, unrecorded chitter-chat by other employees of this most ethical of all administrations...

...but back to the point. The Attorney General has demonstrated that he is not only incapable of faithfully executing the laws of the United States, he can't even be trusted to be man enough to tell the truth about it. The forty-second President of the United States was impeached by the House of Representatives for lying under oath about sexual encounters. This Attorney General has now been demonstrated to have lied under oath and to us about something that looks very much like an effort to turn the supposedly impartial Department of Justice into a wholy-owned subsidiary of the Republican Pary, an important cog in the machinery intended to create that permanent Republican majority that Tom Delay keeps bleating about. As I said, it is difficult to imagine how he can possibly stay in office, given that he has so completely broken faith with the principles that he is supposed to be representing. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that we are witnessing the White House sinking into the same sort of bunker mentality that gripped the Nixon White House as the Watergate scandal grew to maturity, so who knows what justification they will use to keep him in place...although "stinking partisan Democrat witchhunt" is probably a winning bet...

That squeaking noise that Abu Al hears outside his window this morning is the under-greased wheels of the tumbrels circling the block, waiting for him. He probably knows, though he never will admit it, that it's time for him to go, unless his benefactor can pull some sort of rabbit out of his soiled little pointy hat to keep Al on the job. It's time, however, for him to flee out the back door and try to make it to the county line and bring the sad, ugly, destructive saga of Alberto Gonzalez, Counsel To The President, to it's end...

Update: some edits to account for my misunderstandings about the quote in question. The facts, however, remain the same....


Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 AM 0 comments

Dissin' The JEBster, Ivory Towers Edition 

...a body just doesn't know what to think these days. It's hard to guess just how much more insult the mind can take. Tornados in New Mexico in March (apparently they're relatively common later in the year, although I have to confess not ever having heard of many). Rat poison in our pet food, putting little Fluffy and Muggins on the front lines in the battle over global markets (why do we import wheat from China? Ok, ok, that's a rhetorical question...). Animal activists suggesting that some cute little baby polar bear should die; I mean, this little tyke is so cute that if you brought him home and started Friday polar bear blogging, all those other bloggers with their basset hounds and Heinz 57 dogs and cockatiels and all those millions of cats would just say "Oh, the hell with it" and go back to cooking up new and better insulting names for Abu Al and his boss the Chimpster, at least until little Klut grew up and brought a tragic end to your efforts by eating you. And now, on top of all that stuff, we find that Jeb Bush has been bitch-slapped by the faculty of the University of Florida...

The soft, wet, muffled sound of right-wing heads popping must be drowning out the spring bird songs all around "The Sunshine State", if not farther afield. You just don't normally hear about this kind of stuff; usually the denial of an honorary degree is handled behind the scene and not dragged out in the open for a bloody public vote. That's what makes this such an amusing little episode, as the dirty fracking liberal hippies in the Florida faculty laid down their bong pipes long enough to give the bird to 41's somewhat brighter family star...

My Orygun Ducks will be playing the top-ranked basketball team from the University of Florida on Sunday night to see which of them gets to advance to the NCAA Final Four. This slap-down isn't going to make me change my ways and start making 'gator-chomping motions at the tube with my arms every time the Florida boys do something good. I'll still be howling for my Ducks, but if they don't make it I'll be rooting for Florida to take it all in the Finals 'cause I've taken a new liking to that Gainesville bunch....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:32 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

1974 Redux 

...really, what's left? Will the Senate Democrats convene a Select Committee in order to find out about a heretofore unknown recording system in the White House? Will Tony Snow use the phrase "a second-rate personnel action" to describe the firing of several U.S. Attorneys? Who will be "Deep Throat" this time around? I wasn't ready to play the "Last Days Of Nixon" game that has become such a fascination in certain lefty circles over the last couple of weeks, but this afternoon's performance by Gee Dub jangled some long-dormant memory hole in the brain. Anybody at risk of getting one of those obnoxious recruitment letters from the AARP remembers some - if not most - of the particulars of the demise of Richard Milhouse Nixon, and throwing down a challenge to the threat of a Senate subpoena conjurs ugly memories of an uncertain and dangerous time...

The e-mail traffic from the various evidence-dumps suggest a compelling case for the idea that at least some U.S.A.'s were fired for failure to adequately become political agents for Gee Dub and the boys. The effort may have been overzealous and Gee Dub hizownself may not have known that it was going on, but the same could be said of ol' Tricky Dick with regard to the Watergate breakin. As with the Watergate caper, the effort to deny revelation of just what the hell was going on threatens to pose a greater threat to the People In Power than the actual acts themselves. Not to be too Churchillian, but it probably isn't the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning, but there is a certain heft to the undeniable sense that we have been down this road before, and not all that long ago...

George W. Bush has laid down the dueling glove, complete with all the usual lingo about "playing political games" that has been uttered by some notable presidential figures in the past, if you know what I mean and I think you do. It is now the responsibility of Congress to respond to the challenge; might as well get it on and move on to the courts. It's time to find out whether the SCOTUS is actually an independent entity or, like Abu Al Gonzalez, a wholy owned subsidary of the current administration. They weren't in 1973-4, but things change...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:14 PM 0 comments

'Managing' The Information You Don't Like 

...’information management’ is a phrase that doesn’t have a great deal of resonance with the average person, but it is probably one of the most insidious ways that the Bush administration is trying to mess with your mind. The political chatter on the main stage is pretty standard fare and nothing so much out of the ordinary, especially for Republican administrations who seem to be more adept at getting into trouble over major issues of public policy rather than personal sexual encounters, but the current gang in the White House seems bent on breaking new ground in this particular area. We can all nod our heads and say "well, of Course Gee Dub is going to come on all Texas Ranger-y over testimony by his White House advisors past and present". The bill of particulars that is beginning to pile up against the fortress walls of the White House so deep, however, that some of the real, less sexy dangers are slipping through the cracks and getting very little media attention. Take the case of James Hanson...

Mr. Hanson is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in NASA. He has had some outspoken views on the danger of global warming that Bushco has been trying very hard to keep from being heard. The efforts by Gee Dub’s fixers to stifle him and his cohorts and dilute their observations has been prodigious indeed, and those efforts have slipped beneath the waves of public memory and this most recent actual real live Congressional hearing received far less press coverage than the importance of the subject would suggest. I don’t say this as some sort of science geek....well, ok, maybe a little bit...but the idea that a White House would intentionally muzzle those who seek to make statements on matters of science that don’t square with its political agenda is a matter of grave consequence. Lower-level minions with agendas of their own...sure, happens all the time, but most administrations are smart enough to avoid the stone-cold obvious. It’s a stunner, really: these clowns were so comfortable with the idea that they were on the leading edge of that permanent Republican majority that Tom Delay has crawled out of his rathole to start bleating about once again - what with having the keys to Congress and the White House in their pockets - that they didn’t go to any great lengths to even hide their actions. The near-term ramifications of their attempt to drag red herrings across all the real scent trails aren’t as immediately compelling as the mishandling of intelligence that led to Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure in terms of the "investment" of blood and treasure (can’t be using "waste"; wouldn’t be right; just ask McCain and Obama); the long-term ramifications threaten to be starkly dramatic for far more people than Gee Dub’s misbegotten version of the War on Terror. 'Information management' could actually, in the words but not the context of dear ol' Mom, be the death of us yet...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:50 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Missing The Decaying Forest For All The Dead Trees 

...it will be interesting to see how this WaPo piece plays out in terms of the greater soap opera that Alberto Gonzalez is starring in right now. Perhaps the only thing that one of the few remaining fans of the Bush administration have going for them right now is that all the other fetid angry chickens that have stormed into the hen house to crawl up on the roost have pretty much crapped all over this story enough that nobody in the mainstream media is paying much of any attention to it right now. Political firings of U.S. Attorneys is just a whole lot sexier than than abuse of already intrusive federal laws by federal agents - unless you are the sort who constantly peaks out through the drapes at night looking for all those black federal helicopters...

This is really big stuff, and at this moment is being generally ignored by MSM. Were it not for the Scooter trial and the U.S. Attorney firings and the abuse of wounded troops at Walter Reed, the misuse of National Security letters authorized by the Patriot Acts I and II would be the headlining story of the day. Everything that whiny liberals and lefty-leaning brie-and-cheese civil libertarians said about the risks that were presented by the iterations of the Patriot Act have all come true. Agents of the FBI are and have been using the powers of the act to do little more than go on fishing expeditions. More to the point, they have been abusing the authorities granted them by the Patriot Acts, ignoring the very safeguards they were supposed to be employing to prevent abuses of the laws that we were promised they would be faithfully executing. In any other time, this story would be leading every newscast on every channel - ok, so maybe Faux News wouldn't be covering it, but those outlets that still see themselves as real live journalists when they look in their mirrors in the morning would be all over this story. It isn't happening right now, and the sad thing is that it isn't happening because there are so many other scandals pounding down on that sad, hapless little band of miscreants and outright criminals currently holding the White House hostage that real live attacks on all Americans' rights to be left alone doesn't even draw a second glance...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:24 PM 0 comments

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