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

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Digging An Email-Sized Hole 

...the RNC email fiasco has been nothing if not amusing, unless you are somehow connected to a White House that is desperately trying to hide six years of treachery, malfeasances, high crimes, and misdemeanors that have piled up so high that half the people that work in the building will be looking at long years of stamping out furniture pieces for Federal Prison Industries if the truth ever spills out. First, immediately after the Butterfield-like moment when it became clear that administration officials were using the RNC as their own private chatroom, it became clear that years worth of emails (MILLIONS of 'em) had tragically been lost in that mysterious ether that surrounds the computer world. When every computer expert over the age of 14 said, in effect, "Dude, I could recover those emails in 5 minutes", the RNC realized, to its own shock and relief, that it may well be able to actually find some of them after all...

Now comes the White House, which - not being big fans furniture manufacturing as a vocation - has directed the RNC to send every recovered email to it to make sure that there aren't any that contain information that may impinge directly on executive privelege, such as Karl Rove's promises to Jack Abramoff or direction to Abu Al Gonzalez to fire a select list of U.S. Attorney's to stunt a few embarrassing investigations. In effect, this Administration is instructing a nominally independent entity that it shouldn't have been using for official business communications that those possibly illegal communications are covered by executive privelege and can't be released unless the Bush administration does it...

Neat trick.

The Bush administration is claiming, without saying so, that even improperly used, very likely illegally used, nongovernmental communication systems are covered by executive privelege, suggesting that this oft-debated "right" extends to protection of White House actions that may themselves be illegal. This is the "Nixon tapes" wormcan that Alexander Butterfield inadvertantly kicked over during the 1973 Senate Watergate hearing and eventually led to a butt-kicking by the U.S. Supreme Court in the United States vs. Nixon with an 8-0 ruling that executive privelege didn't cover the taping system or the tapes...

This is a different time, of course, with a different Court featuring a powerful phalanx of conservative activist judges, so who knows how such a battle might fare today...although some sharp cookies would probably call this a sucker bet. In any case, the whole show promises to be truly entertaining, but it may only be seen by true politics wonks and those of us who like to see hubris serving as its own punishment because of the constant coverage of the bloody tragic slaughter on the Virginia Tech campus. There is an almost overpowering sense of irony that this fetid band of beady-eyed weasels dared to come into power promising to be the most moral and upright administration in the nation's history but instead is actually starting to make Nixon look pretty good in retrospect...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:55 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Protecting Our Freedoms The George W. Way 

...it was a small item in today's newspaper, and that's all the worse because of the implications of the basic story line. A couple of enablers for the penchant that Gee Dub's handlers have had for making sure that every audience he faces is politically pristine are offering the argument that the president's staff can lawfully remove anyone who's political viewpoint isn't in line with his....just because...

"The president's right to control his own message includes the right to exclude people expressing discordant viewpoints from the audience," says the brief.


There was a time, not all that long ago, when the average person would have looked at a proponent of such a view as if said proponent had begun sprouting extra heads from under said proponent's armpits. There was a time before that when such a proponent would have been dismissed because everyone fully expected Nixon administration operatives to behave in that manner and this sort of imperial behavior was just one of the many lesser reasons we were going to impeach his shiny white butt. This, apparently, is a far different time...

Although the meeting was supposed to be a "town hall" forum being held at the Wings Over The Rockies Air and Space museum at the former Lowry Air Force Base in
Denver, apparently the viewpoint of the various slick, scaly creatures that crawl in the depths of the Bush jungle felt that the taxpayer expenses involved did not make this an actual public event, freeing them from the taxing responsibilities that adherence to the U.S. Constitution might otherwise demand. The rather interesting arguments that these proto-democrats are insisting upon raise some interesting questions: 1) Just what exactly is a "public event" when the taxpayers have payed for the president to come halfway across the country to engage in an event where public policy is going to be discussed? 2) Just what exactly represents "disruption" when people who are not in perfect concord with the president attempt to attend an event that the taxpayers are - at least in part - footing the bill for? 3) Just what exactly will be the measuring stick that will be applied to determine who will be refused admission to a nominally taxpayer-paid presidential event? Will it be bumper stickers? Zip Codes? Shoe styles?

This isn't just about controlling the message; it smacks of the sort of imperialism that this country rejected at its foundation. It's almost impossible to conceive of the possibility, back before the world got crazy, that actual people with actual licenses to practice law in the United States would have had the stones to even offer such a strange, bleakly totalitarian argument for fear of being beaten senseless in the parking lot by peers with a stronger sense of the law and golf clubs in their trunks that they felt comfortable replacing (that would be wrong, of course, but this has become a crazy world). It can only be hoped that the arguments being offered on behalf of the actions in this case are repudiated by the courts, because the other road is a scary thing to contemplate...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:44 PM 0 comments

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