Texas Justice

I'm not a lawyer, so it's alright for you to believe me, but it seems as if among all the clatter and chatter about eight fired U.S. Attorneys, the main point is being overlooked. Every incoming President appoints his own party's faithful to the offices of Federal Prosecutor. It's a perk of the office. But if I hear one more administration toady say they "serve at the pleasure of the President," I'm going to be ill. Ordinarily, that statement would be true enough, but in this Justice Department, the U.S. Attorneys serve to please Karl Rove and his ideological litmus tests. No, Monica Lewinsky "served at the pleasure of the President." These inept cronies of President Zero and his buddy, Shooter, are merely party hacks and sycophants with law degrees, who serve to advance their careers and further the ideological agenda of the ultra-right, to reverse the progressive societal advances of the sixties.

Their e-mails are damning and Karl Rove has been found in the middle of it, but the eight firings weren't the most egregious breaches of the public trust. Sure, Alberto Gonzales fired Carol Lam after she successfully prosecuted the "Duke-stir" Cunningham for lingering too long at the Abramoff cash cow teat, and her sights had been set on another Republican congressman. Sen. Pete Dominici phoned Karl to say he no longer could abide the obstruction of federal prosecutor David Iglesias, a Navy Reserve Commander, because he refused to speed up indictments of Democrats before the last election. And Karl pressured the DOJ and Gonzales to appoint his assistant, Tim Griffin, to the prosecutor's office in Little Rock, just before Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for President. The discussions among the amateurs in the White House concerning whom to fire and why, were ugly and possibly illegal, but the nastiest part of this entire incident is that the Patriot Act was abused intentionally and without question, for domestic political purposes. The Patriot Act gives the President the right to fire any U.S. Attorney and put his own man in the office without congressional oversight only in the case of national emergency. Usually, Federal Prosecutors are chosen with the input of state and local government officials and the area's bar associations, even if it is a partisan exercise. The NSA warantless spying and the government's examination of personal citizens' financial records may be debated on what is the extent of the President's wartime powers, but this interference with the judicial system is a right-wing Republican power grab, pure and simple.

I asked in a previous post what Karl Rove, the president's political advisor, was doing with sensitive information concerning covert officers of the CIA? Why has Rove, elected by no one and thus accountable to no one, been given the right of selection over which U.S. Attorneys are fit to serve the Bushies? If this were the late 18th Century, an operative like Rove, who had pledged his loyalty to a solitary monarch and attempted to subvert and manipulate the nations' system of justice for political gain, would have been hanged for treason. Now, it will be difficult just to get him to testify under oath before Congress. How many more Michael Browns, Scooter Libbys, and now Gonzales' aide Kyle Sampson, are going to fall on a grenade for this American Rasputin? It is now past time to recognize that this is a rogue government that does not care about the last election, or the Iraq Study Group, or the 9/11 Commission's suggestions. They will attempt to seize more power, territory, oil, and cash until they are stopped.

God bless Molly Ivins, she tried to tell us. Before her death from breast cancer last year, Ivins reported on the career of George Bush longer and more insightfully than anyone else. Her bestseller, "Bushwhacked: Life in George Bush's America," (Amazon.com, $9.00) demonstrated, in Ivin's irascible prose, that every revelation of corruption and favoritism that is surfacing in the country right now, was first perfected in Texas, and with the same group of characters; Bush, Harriet Miers, Gonzales, Karen Hughes, Tom DeLay. And all these people shared the same thing in common; they were discoveries and clients of Karl Rove. That's why John Ashcroft was appointed Attorney General in 2000 after he lost the Missouri Senate race to a dead man; he was a client and fellow traveller of Rove. It was all there for anyone to see; the purging of the Texas Supreme Court of Democrats to be replaced by Rove clients, redistricting to try and insure a permanent Republican majority in the Texas legislature, and the unusual practice of smears and indictments being brought against political opponents just before an election, even if the charges mysteriously faded away afterward. This is just the way that Karl Rove conducts business. Molly Ivins' last column for Truthdig.com, was an exhortation to regular citizens to stand up and raise hell about this war and this administration.

I used to be in favor of a Richard Nixon national holiday, where every year on the anniversary of his resignation, his corpse would be exhumed and dragged through the streets of San Clemente. Then we'd always have Nixon to kick around. He was so much more hateable than the current bunch, what with his taking the unprescribed and then experimental drug, Dilantin, a strong anti-seizure medication to control his rage and depression, and the few occasions where he blackened Mrs. Nixon's eyes. Oh, you didn't know? I said you could believe me. But the Bush/Cheney/Rove troika are giving us all black eyes. At least, Nixon understood the need for diplomacy with other nations, if not his own wife. This regime has become a clear and present danger to our form of government, in both foreign and domestic matters, and it is the Constitutional responsibility of concerned citizens to see that they are removed before the 2008 election. In John Dean's words, this is "Worse Than Watergate."

Speaker Pelosi has said that, "impeachment is off the table." Perhaps it is time to get a bigger table, because impeachment may be the last opportunity to rescue our representative form of government from the clutches of these rapacious men. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would be concerned that Cheney's bastard child, Halliburton, is moving from Houston to Dubai. If the United Arab Emirates were prevented from running our ports, Cheney will just bring the ports to them. And the 98,000 acres that the Bush family recently purchased in Paraguay wouldn't be so disturbing an investment had the Paraguayan government not just signed an agreement with the U.S. granting sanctuary and amnesty to any soldier, officer, or government official who may be inconvenienced by war crimes tribunals in the Hague over the Iraq debacle. To a conspiracy buff, it may appear that these guys are preparing to take the money and run. Bush has already been complimentary of the South American "carne." If Nancy Pelosi doesn't have the political will to press for impeachment, it is up to ordinary citizens to make enough noise to demand it.

Since these boys choose to go down the old Nixon stonewall road, the next thing we can expect is the banshee cry of "Executive Privilege," to keep the imperial advice of Karl Rove from becoming public. This is going all the way to the Supreme Court, so let the subpoenas fall where they may. It is well to remember that the Bush Supreme Court appointments began with Clarence Thomas, but might have ended with Harriet Miers were it not for the uproar of the populace and their representatives. Just because the Court appointed Bush, doesn't mean they will decide to keep him there. Judges don't usually take kindly to judicial demands by non-lawyers fiddling with the system, unlike the Attorney General and his para-legals who know no other way. Gonzales can go or stay, it doesn't matter. But piece by piece, the Bush team is unravelling. When all the layers are peeled away from an onion that has gone bad, you are left with the rotten core, which must be discarded lest it poison you. For the sake of our Democracy and the rule of law; Impeach.