Impeach Gonzo at your own risk

I'm all for impeaching Alberto Gonzales; I think there's sufficient evidence not only to impeach his ass, but to chuck him in the clink today. He spent another few hours lying to the Senate yesterday, and now he doesn't even bother feigning respect or humility while using the Bill of Rights as Depends undergarments. He lies in a condescending manner, sneering at times with open contempt for the very processes he's sworn to uphold and protect. I was against Gonzo from the get-go, and upon his nomination pointed out that he was worse than the lunatic he replaced. John Ashcroft would never attempt to pressure a hospitalized and sedated AG to overturn the Constitution, as Gonzales did. Ashcroft would perhaps have anointed the sedated's head with oil and sung a rousing song about eagles...

The problem with impeaching Gonzales is that Bush has even worse assholes waiting in the wings. I suspect this is intentional, a sort of bizarro self-protection racket. "Impeach me, muthafuckas," Bush thinks to himself, "and you get Preznit Cheney. Impeach Alberto and you get Theodore Olson, or John Yoo."

The fact that we finally have a Senate that won't rubber-stamp whatever hoodlum the Administration sends up for approval means nothing to Bush. Recess appointments, baby.

Legally Blind 2

Like, whatever, oh my God! The President and the Constitution are like, the freaking same thing, Grandpa. As if!

Keith goes after DHS for Cherting Off

We need a new H.L. Mencken

Once again I subjected myself to a bit of cable news last evening. Some ingenuous talking head named Viqueira asserted that people in DC were truly surprised that a "family values" conservative like Senator Vitter (R-LA) had frequented prostitutes for much of his career.

Whence these DC pundits and their buffoonery? Nobody with any sense is ever surprised to hear of a politician who frequents prostitutes, or who solicits sex in public restrooms, or who cheats on his or her spouse. And people with true discernment, honed by decades of studious attention to history and current events, are in fact least surprised by the exposure of family values conservatives as deeply hypocritical on these matters. Where has this Viqueira character been? Has he heard of Bob Barr, Bob Livingstone, Robert Packwood, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, or Henry Hyde? And the culprits who spew hypocritical fire and brimstone from the hallowed halls of government are of course accompanied by those who do so from the pulpit: Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and most recently Ted Haggart. I shall end my list there, but could continue it until carpal tunnel swelled my wrists beyond endurance.

Journalists do many a dis-service in the United States. One of their worst offenses is feigning surprise at this sort of behavior by public representatives of the Moral Majority. Were they to practise actual journalism, they would of course know that most of the family values conservatives and Christian rightists are not at all concerned with Jesus and standards of moral behavior. The most fiery Bible thumpers in government want one paramount result: that slavish drooling mobs of mindless ignorami--preached at mercilessly by retrograde theocrats and small-town Torquemada wannabes, flumoxed by screeds about homosexual cults, secular humanist abortion factories, and the End of Times--will turn out en masse to pull levers marked R in elections.

Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed can howl about Jesus for hours each day, tearing their garments and wearing hair shirts, but nobody with a ninth grade education would be surprised if either were caught pissing in the baptismal font or using pages from Leviticus to clean up santorum after visiting a homosexual brothel. Their true Lord and Saviour is Manon, and were they instructed to blaspheme mightily in exchange for a fat check from a Big Pharma outfit or Indian casino, either gentleman would pucker eagerly at the raising of Baphomet's tail. Their supposed Christianity is an illusion designed to lure voters with emotionally potent oversimplifications. Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed know, after all, that regardless what happens to the law books, their girlfriends, daughters, and sons will always have access to safe abortions, cocaine, hookers, and pornography.

To journalists like Viqueira I suggest one simple tactic to avert future surprise: the next time an elected official enthuses about the Christian principles upon which America was supposedly founded, ask for specifics. What precisely are the scriptural prescriptions for an egalitarian democratic republic? Where in the Bible can I find them? What evidence of Biblical or theological underpinnings exist in our deeply secular Constitution?

I would like to point out that for nearly two thousand years Christian history was anything BUT democratic, and that Americans who believe that the Bible had anything to do with the political theorizing of the principal Founders of our Republic are in dire need of history lessons. The Founders sought keenly to evade any influence of Christian theology in the business of government. History taught them valuable lessons. The bloody centuries in Europe from the fall of Rome up through the seventeenth century were rife with examples of Christian values at work. And on the intolerant shores of the Puritan northeast, where Quakers were whipped, witches broiled, crushed and drowned, and savages converted under penalty of death the Founders saw further evidence that Christian principles rarely had anything to do with the message of the Christ. These men founded our country on ENLIGHTENMENT principles of secular humanism, NOT Christian principles.

I do not doubt some Democrats shall fall victim to the DC Madam phone list. But Democrats are not railing about private sexual behavior to the same degree as their Republican counterparts. I for one fully support Larry Flynt's mission to out these hypocrites.

AG the soon-to-be-former AG

I listened to a couple hours of Gonzales's abysmal performance yesterday. A remarkable display of ineptitude. The guy can't learn a script, or tell a competent fib; if you can't even lie well, what can you do, Alberto?

I mean aside from trashing the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, etc.

Gotta love this Times editorial:

Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch.... He delegated responsibility for purging their ranks to an inexperienced and incompetent assistant who, if that’s possible, was even more of a plodding apparatchik....

Aye, that Klein-a not music

Another DC windsock pundit realizes Bush is no longer popular and jumps on the trash W. bandwagon. Rather than singing his praises, Eric Alterman gives Joe Klein a satisfying drubbing for his too-little, too-late switch from cheerleader to critic:

Jeebus Christmas, what was your first clue, Sherlock? The Social Security whipping? The Schiavo circus? Tthe Katrina debacle? The 2006 elections? It plainly wasn't the monumental disaster in Iraq, because you were hoping for the best there up until 30 seconds before you hit "Send" on your very brave column, as best I can tell. There are several things that are important to remember about Joe before his fellow Beltway buffet-grazers start fitting him for a toga. First is that, both online and in the mainstream media, smarter people than Joe Klein have been saying everything that Joe is now bravely saying almost from jump. For their troubles, they got insults, condescension and worse from, among other people, Joe Klein. Well, bollocks. I note for the record that he's still alternatively ignorant and gutless on the subject of the Constitution. You can't impeach a president because he's a self-evident f**k-up-- or for "maladministration," to use a more polite term that the Founders explicitly rejected. Klein -- and, it should be noted, Ann Coulter -- are both wrong about that. And, because he's got such a sweet tooth for Executive power, as long as it's exercised in ways that make him feel safe and warm and make his heart go pitty-pat, he not only minimizes dangers of turning the Department of Justice into a chop-shop, he also declines to address the towering constitutional heresy regarding Executive powers that has allowed this administration to run amuck over the Bill of Rights. And, finally, probably because he doesn't want to be seen as being "soft" on dangerous dark people who are coming to kill him, Klein neglects even to mention that this president already has admitted breaking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on 14 different occasions, and has announced his intention to go on breaking it, based on a preposterous fig-leaf designed by his pet lawyers. Want to impeach the guy? Impeach him for that. Put John Yoo and the "unitary executive" on trial. That's really the kind of issue that the impeachment process is supposed to address anyway.

In case you're keeping score, that makes it Alterman 52, Klein 0 in their little bloggie war.

Fair and Balanced

A Fox affiliate distorts its own poll results to protect the President.

Now!

After Kyle Sampson's testimony, Congress must act immediately to impeach Alberto Gonzales. Enough is enough.

Reductio ad absurdum

Keith Olbermann did a great job poking holes into (and poking fun at) Alberto Gonzalez's lame TV interview with Pete Williams. Brief summary?

Uh, I know for a fact that these attorneys were asked to resign for reasons completely appropriate, but I don't know any particulars, nor was I at all involved in the process, but I do know why they were fired and it wasn't for political reasons, but I have no knowledge of the reasons they resigned. Other people who know my job advised me to fire them, so I did.

Hmmm. That's a bit like using the "these attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President" argument for firing the attorneys, and then claiming the President had nothing to do with the terminations, and no knowledge of the machinations involved.

Of course the enormous document dumps of emails and memos reveal that Gonzo and Rove and Miers and Bush were heavily involved.

Now Gonzo's senior counselor won't testify. Impeach the sonofabitch! Bush will only with great reluctance hang him out to dry because he'd rather have Gonzo inside the tent pissing out then outside pissing in, to paraphrase LBJ on Hoover.

On the Lam

Oh my goodness. Too bad E. Howard Hunt died early this year. He could have lined up for the hush money likely flowing from Cheney's coffers at this moment.

Mentí, estoy mintiendo, mentiré

It's as if someone in the Cheney Administration is reading about Nixon's demise in order to brush up on how to unravel in the same manner. We've even had CIA guys with hookers again. The parallels grow more uncanny daily. Unfortunately (well, perhaps fortunately) we don't have cable TV at the new place yet. I can't see what kind of coverage the Gonzalez/Rove Justice Department purge of attorneys who would not use their office to suppress Democratic voters is getting. These guys love to purge and surge, they surely do.

Lots of good coverage at Kos (here, here, here). The WaPo and the Times appear to be working the story, almost to the point I'm considering re-subsribing.

It's a serious, serious thing, and yet another in a long list of articles of impeachment that need drawing up should be drawn up for this. Remember Harriet Miers' sudden departure last year? Now Gonzalez' Chief of Staff has resigned as well. Get them in front of Congress and seize their passports post haste.

Speaking of Republican Presidential Hopefuls

There is one liberal in the Presidential race--former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. I saw him say this on one of the cable shows recently, as voiceover to footage of himself jamming out to Born to be Wild with his rock band:

There’s one issue I want to touch on. A key element of education is music and art education. It’s not expendable, extracurricular or extraneous. The future economy of America is going to be a creative economy. I am very passionate about it. Math, science and language scores improve dramatically when the student has music skills. Spatial reasoning is enhanced by music instructions. It is who we are. It defines us as a culture and a civilization. Very few people my age are still playing tackle football, but I’m still playing bass guitar in a rock-and-roll band.

Huckabee perhaps actually has values, instead of merely talking about them all the time. Hence the likelihood he'd win the Republican nomination is tinier than the remaining kernel of Bush's credibility.

There are chinks in Huckabee's warm and fuzzy armor. He has said troubling things about Creationism in schools, and who will go to Hell. But while most of the other 'moderates' in either party swerve rightward for votes, Huckabee swerves left.

The Moral Majority

Newt Gingrich--who recently admitted he was engaged in an extramarital affair while enthusiastically pursuing impeachment during Monica Gate--justified himself thusly:

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."

That sinuously evasive logic won't get you through the eye of the needle, Newt. You took it upon yourself to cast the first stone, which is contrary to the tenets of your belief system. Or is that belief system merely a facade contrived to fool the Christers and pulpit-thumpers?

Which paragon of family values will win the Republican nomination? I don't care how many affairs or divorces a presidential candidate has--but outright hypocrisy I can't condone. Gingrich hasn't announced yet of course, but I'm sure he'll join his fellow divorced adulterers soon.