today's REAL scandal

No it isn't the revelation that New York Governor Elliot Spitzer enjoyed the company of prostitutes. That's between him and his wife, assuming he didn't use state funds.

The real scandal is an ongoing one - the refusal of the de facto Bush Administration's so-called Department of Justice to acknowledge that Congress has a right to compel testimony.

So now the House Judiciary Committee is suing to force Josh Bolten (White House chief of staff) and Harriet Miers, Bush's former lawyer, to come and talk to them about the Great US Attorney Massacre.

Love the advanced legal reasoning now being advanced by Alberto Gonzales' spiritual heir, Michael Mukasey. Mukasey says that Bolten, Miers and others "cannot be prosecuted because they were following legal advice from the Justice Department."

What? Where is THAT written? Legal advice to do something that turns out to be against the law is no shield from the law - even if it is from lawyers (actually, almost certainly from political appointees not career lawyers) at the Department of Justice.

If the Department of Justice advised the White House that sending Karl Rove on a secret mission to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and ship her to Guantanamo, would that immunize Rove from testifying about the plot?

This is absurd. They are playing out the string, hoping to delay Congress until the Bush Administration finally leaves town. I hope Congress doesn't just drop it then. There were crimes committed, by people in the White House and at Justice. Remember, this is about firing competent attorneys because they failed to show adequate loyalty to the Fuehrer, sorry I mean Decider. And THAT lack of loyalty was based on their refusal to bring questionable legal cases against DEMOCRATIC candidates right before elections.

In other words, they were fired for putting the rule of law ahead of the cult of personality that the Bush Republican Party has exalted these past 7-plus years (and longer if you consider their unthinking love for St Ronald of Reagan). And for not recognizing Bush/Cheney's theory of the Unitary Executive which roughly translated means "personal rule of the President and all loyalty owed to him, not the Consitution or law or country." You know, like Louis XIV enjoyed in France or Henry VIII in England, hundreds of years ago.

stonewalling

The next time de facto President George Bush complains about how Congress has "drug out" the Great US Attorney Massacre, remember it is being "drug out" (in his elegant phrase) because of consistent stonewalling by the White House and the so-called Department of Justice. A fine example is today's report in the Post that the White House has supposedly decided to defy Congress again and refuse to supply more information related to the firing of the US attorneys. It seems the White House lawyers are ready to go to court on this because they think they can win. Legal experts don't necessarily share that assessment, though.

The White House has also directed former aides Harriet "Not on the Supreme Court" Miers and Sara Taylor not to respond to Congress's subpoenas. Taylor's lawyer has said (and I paraphrase) "oh boo hoo, li'l Sara shouldn't have to choose between responding to Congress and disappointing her dearly beloved President". To which I say, tough. Congress has the legal ability to compel people to testify. Too bad if you have to say something the White House won't like.

chertoff's latest misdirection

Michael Chertoff continues in the de facto Bush Administration's tradition of lies, misdirection, and self-delusion. The latest example was in his fevered missive in the Washington Post today. Chertoff writes to counter what former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in the same pages on March 25: "The 'war on terror' has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us."

Chertoff said Brzezinski just doesn't get it. We really ARE at "war" and not with the tactic of terrorism, but with "a global movement and ideology whose members seek to advance totalitarian aims through terrorism." After calling Brzezinski naive and bringing up the Iranian revolution (which did happen on Brzezinski's watch), Chertoff says we should look at the threat Al Qaeda and "others in its ideological terror network" pose.

Now Chertoff, the Hero of New Orleans, says that the struggle IS a war. Why? Because Osama Bin Laden said so. Oh, well that's easy then. At least Chertoff recognizes that Bin Laden is important. Wonder why we haven't caught him, over 5 1/2 years after 9/11?

But let's recognize the fact that it isn't a war in the normal sense of the word, any more than the War on Drugs or the late War on Poverty are. And it certainly does NOT warrant comparison to the Cold War. If Chertoff doesn't remember, Brzezinski certainly does -- that was a war with the world's second-most powerful military and a couple of dozen client states aligned against us, where large-scale conflict against a well-equipped modern military was a very real possibility. Not to mention the thousands of nuclear warheads we aimed at each other. Now THAT would have been a war.

Chertoff said that Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups "aspire to dominate all countries. Their goal is a totalitarian, theocratic empire to be achieved by waging perpetual war on soldiers and civilians alike. That includes the use of weapons of mass destruction."

Well, actually Mr Secretary of Homeland Security (hey, why are YOU writing this? Wouldn't this be better from Condi Rice or Bob Gates or old whats-his-name, the current National Security Advisor? Maybe they weren't willing to put their names to this fanciful piece of crap.), they don't. They would like to bring Islamic rule to Islamic countries. Some of them even dream of reestablishing the Caliphate, from Spain to India. Of course, there are also people who dream of reestablishing the Bourbon monarchy in France. Dreams don't equal capability.

And speaking of capability, Chertoff would have us believe that their goals are "not entirely fanciful." Sure, they "sometimes achiev(e) control of territory" -- but that is only of territory in failed states like post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan or Somalia. Or post-2003 Iraq. In functioning states, they have YET to take control of anything significant. But if we continue to destabilize enough states as we have Iraq, I'm sure their odds of gaining control of somewhere will improve. Hey, the Taliban is on the verge of regaining control in Afghanistan...

As for Chertoff's consequences -- it is true that 9/11 was pretty damn bad, especially for those poor people who died in New York, Arlington, and Pennsylvania, and their families. (Maybe Bush should have listened to his anti-terror chief Richard Clarke in 2001, eh?) Same for those killed in Bali, Madrid, London, Morocco, etc. But as terrible as that attack was, it didn't pose a threat to the existence or form of the United States.

Chertoff does say something I agree with. We can't win this so-called war with guns; "'soft' power matters." Right. Soft power as in influencing people in important places to convince them that our side in the campaign against terror is the right side.

But Chertoff doesn't note that Iraq is only a theater in this campaign because we INVADED it. Remember, Iraq and Saddam had absolutely ZERO connection to 9/11. About the same involvement as Idaho, and way less than Saudi Arabia. And our soft power has if anything been aimed firmly at our own feet, as the de facto Bush Administration consistently chooses the options that make us LESS identified with being right and just.

It is amazing how much post-9/11 good will we have pissed away by our actions. By invading Iraq without good reason. By giving reasons for our actions that are demonstrably false. By torturing people in the name of protecting our rights and freedoms. By proclaiming that anybody who doesn't agree with us 100% is against us. By locking people up without trial for years. By arresting people based on the flimsiest of evidence -- as in a denunciation by an Afghan tribesman who can settle an old family score AND make a few thousand bucks by accusing his neighbor of being a terrorist. By kidnapping people from other countries and flying them to places where our friends will torture them on our behalf. And I don't mean just taking people out of places like Iraq and Afghanistan -- I mean the CIA kidnapping people from the territory of a friend and ally like Italy without asking permission of Italy's government. How would WE react if Italian secret agents grabbed somebody on the streets of Dallas and bundled them off to another country without our permission?

Not to mention the fact that by killing some huge number of Muslims in Iraq -- tens of thousands or more likely, hundreds of thousands -- we are, as Egypt's President Mubarek predicted, creating many more recruits for anti-US Islamic terrorist groups.

Chertoff closes with an exhortation we would all do well to heed: "history teaches that the false comfort of complacency is a dangerous indulgence in the face of a determined enemy."

That's true. And that's why we can't afford to see the actions of the de facto Rove I mean Cheney I mean Bush Administration as just dirtier-than-usual politics. The Great US Attorney Massacre is one front in Rove's effort to create a permanent Republican regime by pushing greater levels of voter suppression. Alberto Gonzales and others in Bush's inner circle want to criminalize media reporting. They want us to shut up, be happy, and let our superiors -- that is, this small elite of theocon/neocon Republicans -- tell us what to believe and how to behave, in exchange for them keeping us safe. Maybe.

And that's what this op-ed piece by Chertoff is about. Misdirecting our attention from the corrupt and power-grabbing nature of the unitary executive Bush regime.

good bye goodling, and dissatisfaction in minnesota

Washington's current scandal-ensnared Monica, Justice's Monica Goodling, has quit. All the better to prepare her defense I guess.

But the more interesting part of this report was news that three senior employees at the US Attorney's office in Minnesota demoted themselves rather than work directly for former Alberto Gonzales aid Rachel K. Paulose, recently appointed without benefit of Senate confirmation thanks to the quiet amendment of the Patriot Act. You may recall Paulose -- she was the Gonzales aide with delusions of grandeur one who had a ceremony for her new job more befitting the coronation of the King of the Belgians than the appointment of an assistant attorney in what is still, for the moment, a republic. I must say, based on that alone I don't blame them for not wanting to work directly under her.

But remember, boys and girls, as Alberto Gonzales' inept reign at the Department of Justice continues to unravel -- this isn't a scandal about misleading Congress over the dismissal of eight US attorneys. This is a scandal about the removal of US attorneys for either being too zealous in prosecuting Republican crooks like Randy "Duke" Cunningham, or for failure to politicize the office by indicting Democrats in New Mexico right before an election. And it is about the GOP effort to use the courts to suppress voters in predominantly Democratic areas.