The icing on the cake
It seems that George Bush’s administration only goes from bad to worse. The US Attorney’s scandal really is extraordinary, even by the standards of an Administration that alters scientific reports to downgrade the evidence of climate change.
According to a fascinating article in the New Yorker, it seems that Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been sacking US Attorneys because they wouldn’t do the political dirty work of the Bush administration. The Attorneys are political appointments that usually last four years but the Administration is getting rid of some of them early. It seems that some of them are failing to lay corruption charges against local Democrats in the lead up to local elections. Presumably some of them seem to think that there should be evidence. It is clearly a sackable offence to refuse to smear the name of Bush’s political opponents. They are being replaced by reliable Republican supporters who will no doubt do the right thing.
The icing on the cake is that the Administration attempted to use provisions of the Patriot Act that allowed them to appoint new replacement Attorneys without getting them confirmed by the Senate - a rather blatant example of the use of the war-of-terror to attack freedom and democracy. The Senate responded by repealing that section. The Congress is looking to subpoena Rove - now that should be something to look forward to.
April 13th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Actually, I’ve been following this story with some interest, as it really encapsulates this administration’s hubris and incompetence. It’s also a fast-moving story, and shows every sign of metastasizing into Watergate proportions.
The latest wrinkle: The White House and Republican National Committee have “lost” about 5 MILLION emails that were sought after by Congressional Democrats.
Good times for muckrakers.
April 14th, 2007 at 12:04 am
Until Pelosi grows a spine and puts impeachment on the table this administration is going to continue. I thought better of her. I wonder what’s preventing her from moving on this (besides the appearance of a blatant grab for power (impeach Bush and Cheney and she’s the President) that would put off the centrist opposition to Bushco).
BJ
April 14th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Pelosi is great. I actually have faith that the US system will heal itself, there are enough checks and balances that even an out-of-control administration will eventually be held to account.
For example : the courts have determined that the Environmental Protection Agency is actually obliged to regulate greenhouse gases.
On the other hand, in Russia, the brief era of democracy is clearly over.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:02 am
BJ
Is Pelosi (aka Plastic Nancy) from the same party that fought tooth and nail against impeachment when their man (liar) was in the white house?
April 14th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Bro : I don’t want to insinuate that all right wingers are sexually repressed or frustrated, but it’s really amazing how they bring any political discussion about the US around to Clinton … I get the impression that it’s not the lies, but the oral sex that gets them all steamed up.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Alistair
What a strange post, perhaps you should question your own level of sexual frustration/repression.
It is and always will be, all about the lies and the amazing level of hypocrisy the left show.
The same thing is happening here, it is now quite acceptable in New Zealand to attack and persecute any western religion yet any suggestion of an attack on eastern religion or dare I say a minority then the politically correct come down on you like a ton of bricks.
Mind you, as Chris Trotter suggests, the left can justify anything as long as they retain the reigns of power.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:58 am
You’re quite right Bro. A hundred thousand unnecessary deaths in Iraq = a few blow jobs in the White House. They are strictly morally equivalent. I thank you for opening my eyes on this.
April 14th, 2007 at 11:28 am
alistair..of course you are correct/can ‘insinuate’ about righwingers politics (often) being in part forged by the sexual repression/frustrations of their early years..
the universal frustrations of the rightwing geeks..
of ‘..not getting any..’
that leading to money/power/taking from others becoming their driving forces..
and that mix..of course..= rightwing political beliefs..
(it’s all a matter of subconcious revenge actually…
the obvious example being their revenge on those who obviously did ‘get some’..
solo-mothers…)
and their craven focus on money usually means they have the means to advocate the ripping away of social supports from everyone else…
(see..!..revenge again..)
and because they feel they ‘hold the cards’..they want to return to those good ol’ days…
of low/no taxes on their wealth..
and ‘widows and orphans to the gutter!’..
that’s your average rightwinger in a nutshell really..
a toxic mix of sexual frustration/repression/greed/selfishness/revenge..
and totally devoid of the milk of human kindness..
(all in all..it dosen’t really make for that palatable a profile..?
eh..?…)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
April 14th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Phil
Please try that again, I have a feeling that you do (on the odd occasion) make a few good points.
The trouble is (for me anyway) is that it is near impossible to read.
April 14th, 2007 at 11:48 am
alistair
So you agree with Trotter then?… lies from the left are ok.
April 14th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
# big bruv Says:
>Alistair
>It is and always will be, all about the lies and the amazing level of hypocrisy the left show.
If it’s really about the lies, then why are so many of the people who pushed to impeach Clinton for his lies now opposed to impeaching Bush for his?
Either you say that all lies to congress are equally bad, or lies to congress about issues that are within Congress’s area of responsibility are worse than lies in response to congress asking questions that are outside congress’s area of responsibility. Either way, Bush deserves to be impeached.
April 14th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
get someone to walk you through it b.b..
(..tho’ it could all still be too ‘raw’/fresh for you..eh..?..)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
April 14th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
phil
I much prefer to drive through it if you don’t mind.
Not sure what the rest of your post had to say.
Bruv (No Ego.co.nz)
April 14th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Bro, I’m aghast at the quality of your moral judgment.
Imagine you have two sons. One of them steals some lollies and lies about it. The other tortures a playmate to death and lies about it.
You punish them the same, I guess. A lie is a lie, right?
April 14th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Using force that is reasonable in the circumstances, of course, Alistair!
April 15th, 2007 at 1:33 am
And then of course there’s your middle boy Wolfie, guilty on both counts. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
April 15th, 2007 at 6:58 am
BB
There was never a valid case for impeaching Clinton. “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” is (and should be) a very high bar to get over. We’ve been over this before.
I think you know that you’ve got no case to argue here. The only problem with impeaching Bush and Cheney tomorrow is that Pelosi becoming President makes her PERSONALLY an interested party.
It is certainly the case however, that Cheney and Bush need to be impeached. Their treasonous activity in high office has cost the world so dearly that my personal opinion is they’ve conveniently defined the nation to be at war and treason in time of war gets you the firing squad. They deserve nothing less.
Bush’s foreign policy is determined by looking into other leaders eyes… probably because he’s easily hypnotized. His playing sock-puppet to Dr Strangelove becomes far easier to understand this way.
Best moves are probably to impeach Cheney and get Rove tossed in the slammer.
respectfully
BJ
April 15th, 2007 at 10:29 am
alistair
Now that’s just being silly, however I can assure you of one thing, both would get at least a good smack on the backside.
April 15th, 2007 at 10:30 am
BJ
There was a very good case for impeaching Clinton, he told bare faced lies to the American people.
Why is it that this is seen as acceptable by the left?
April 15th, 2007 at 10:50 am
why do you guys bother engaging with BB? the guy’s a complete fruitcake, and no amount of rational argument will convince him. Do not feed the loopy trolls!
April 15th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
stuey
Show me some balanced rational argument and I will be more than happy to reconsider my point of view.
It strikes me that you want people to blindly believe your propaganda without question.
April 15th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I’d love to see Bro talk about the green subjects that he actually agrees with us on. Animal welfare is the only one that I know of.
Actually, every time he is referred to as “BB”, it makes me smirk… here in France there is someone who is universally known as BB who is passionate about animal welfare, but hard-right (Front National) in every other respect… someone you all know of… Brigitte Bardot.
Could they be related?
April 15th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
BB
I do not get that he told bare-faced lies to the American people. To them he told a literal legal truth that many did not understand. In no wise is this an impeachable offense however, even if he DID tell them a lie. Similarly with Bush. The impeachable offense is lying to Congress, which he did in the lead-up to the Iraq war in order to actually invoke their CONDITIONAL permission to take the nation to war. That vote was one of the most shameful abdications of authority that the Congress has hever moved, and all who voted for it should resign.
The resulting war has cost the country half a trillion dollars, the cream of its military, and all of its credibility.
It makes a difference BB, it really does, who was lied to and what the consequences were. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is not an empty phrase.
respectfully
BJ
April 16th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Thanks for the link on Wolfowitz Alistair. Dubious behaviour from another Bush team member. Are any of them above board?
Web campaigning organisation Avaaz is running a campaign here:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/sack_wolfowitz/
to get him fired for his misdemeanours. With George’s support it seems unlikely that he’ll have to accept any real responsibility for giving his partner (who was working at the World bank when he took on the top job) a $US 61,000 pay rise to $194,000 whiole shifting her to a job in the State Department (but keeping her on the WB payroll. Apparently it’s more than Condoleeza Rice is paid.
April 16th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
And the missing Rove emails could be just about as big a thing as the missing 18 minutes from the Nixon White House tapes.
Gonzales, Wolfowitz, Rove - all being lined up now! Guess there might still be hope for impeaching Cheney and Bush as well.
April 17th, 2007 at 2:48 am
Ah, I love the sweet smell of looming impeachment in the morning.
BB: The difference is that the bar is supposed to be set quite high for impeachment, and it relates to offenses against the country.
I would suggest that lying about your sex life is not quite in the same category as lying in order to go on an ill-thought-out crusade that has directly cost many americans their lives, and indirectly put them in much further danger of terrorist activity due to destabilising regional politics in the middle east.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
alistair,
- “You’re quite right Bro. A hundred thousand unnecessary deaths in Iraq = a few blow jobs in the White House. They are strictly morally equivalent. I thank you for opening my eyes on this.”
I think you’ll find that it’s actually regional Muslims, not Americans, who have committed nearly all of those thousands of murders in Iraq.
I’m surprised you don’t know this. It’s been all on the news for years.
As for impeachment of Presidents, I’m all for it: The American Constitution is explicitly clear that virtually all powers belong to the states and that the federal government has only very limited and very weak powers. Yet the federal government has become an all-powerful monster which has thoroughly usurped the Constitution.
On that basis *all* Presidents going back to at *least* before the 20th century deserved to have been tried for treason and to have suffered the consequences. This obviously includes Bushes junior and senior, as well as Clinton.
April 17th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Ari
There you are wrong, Clinton’s lies did cause the death of thousands of innocent people, they were all American.
Now I know that many from the hard left would be quite happy about that the fact remains that had Clinton not been so busy telling lies to avoid impeachment then he could have done something about Bin Laden when he had the chance.
Pity the left are prepared to overlook this in their desperation to get rid of Bush.
I suppose plastic Nancy and Killer Ted Kennedy will give Gulliani the same grief when he is President as well.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Riiiiight Dwarp… Nobody could be expected to know that throwing a match into a powder keg might have unintended consequences… All care and no responsibility eh?
As for the rest of your rant, I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.
April 18th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Mouldwarp
You don’t reckon all those expensive fireworks we air-freighted into the country killed a lot of people? Really? We’ve gotta investigate the air force about the imaginary effectiveness of all that ordnance. The CURRENT murders are the result of our removing the restraints of a secular but corrupt tyranny in favour of a vacuum. The religion based civil war that is the result was predicted LONG before the first bombs fell in this century. It is our responsibility even though it is Iraqis who are popping a cap on other Iraqis.
The Constitutional issue was joined and decided in a venue somewhat more decisive than SCOTUS, we call it “The Civil War” but the interpretation or misinterpretation of the Constitution is NOT a reason for impeachment. even if It may be a legitimate issue in a legal and theoretical sense. It is not related to the performance or crimes of individual elected officials.
OTOH, I DO often feel that every elected official should serve a term in prison after their term in office. Whether or not we catch them at whatever they do.
BJ
April 18th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Mouldwarp, for the record, you’re full of crap
those deaths would not have occurred had the invasion not taken place, ergo, they were caused by the invasion. By your twisted logic, if I push you onto a road and a truck runs you down, I’m not responsible for your death, the truck driver is. Complete bollocks
April 18th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Tim,
- “those deaths would not have occurred had the invasion not taken place, ergo, they were caused by the invasion.”
This is like blaming the SWAT team when some of the hostages get shot during the rescue attempt.
The blame - all of it - for the campaigns of atrocities being carried out in Iraq lies squarely with those who are engaged in them, i.e. groups of Muslim fanatics and criminal thugs.
Bush is culpable only in that this might not be a legitimate use of the US defense forces, it is not legitimate to charge US taxpayers for this adventure, and he lied about a supposed threat to US interests to gain support for the liberation of the country. Whilst all this may be true, it is not the same thing as saying he is responsible for the carnage in Iraq. He is not.
- “By your twisted logic, if I push you onto a road and a truck runs you down, I’m not responsible for your death, the truck driver is. Complete bollocks”
I’m guessing that the truck driver who *accidentally* ran me down in your analogy represents the Muslim fanatics in Iraq who *deliberately* kill and maim people by the hundred.
Now, either you’re just very poor at analogies or else you hold the racist view that, like children or savages, Arabs can’t be held to the same moral standard as everyone else.
April 18th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
You invade a country, you’re responsible for it. This is the lesson of history. You can terrorise the population into meek submission through rape, pillage etc (the traditional route), or you can pacify it by confiscating all the ordnance, purging the evil leaders, reinforcing existing social and administrative structures, providing massive economic aid and guidance (e.g. Germany or Japan after WWII).
The USA didn’t do any of that. The Bush gang thought that history was over (Fukuyama said so!), and didn’t apply to them. They LITERALLY thought that they could create an alternative reality by willing it. The fact that this was incredibly stupid and criminally irresponsible, does not absolve them of responsibility.
April 18th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Alistair,
- “You invade a country, you’re responsible for it”
More precisely, Iraqis were liberated. There are no associated responsibilities for a liberating force. They could have washed their tanks and gone home.
Any act of violence or oppression is always entirely the moral responsibility of those committing the act.
You are trying to argue that if I go on a murdering spree because the state doesn’t provide a police presence in my neighbourhood, then the state, not me, is responsible for my rampage.
In this case Saddam served the role of policeman and Bush removed him for very good reasons. However, if I now go and plant car bombs in Iraqi marketplaces the blame and responsibility remains entirely mine, not Bush’s.
April 19th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Ah b*gger it. I started to write a reply to Dwarp, but I think I’ll let someone else have a go, if anyone can be bothered.
April 19th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Mouldwarp
You are as wrong as anyone I have EVER heard talking about this including Rumsfeld and Feith. Understanding the situation in Iraq before the war is important to understanding why what you say here is so at odds with reality.
Iraq is not a single country except by Fiat. It was created by some bold strokes of the pen and welded together by main force. Like Yugoslavia it had no possibility of living peacefully with itself except under a leadership whose ruthlessness and power held it so. Democracy in such a situation is some idealistic right-wingers wet dream. It CANNOT happen. I knew that. The CIA middle-east bureau knew that. Most scholars of the place knew that.
What the US did was remove the power holding it together, and then the US determined that it should stay together anyway, but it did NOT provide the weight of arms, the boots on the ground, to do that long enough for a new leadership to emerge.
One could argue that the initial act of violence was the creation of Iraq in the first instance, which places the blame on the West, but not particularly on othe US. However, the place WAS stable and functional under Saddam. Not a nice place to live, but not whirling apart like a broken centrifuge as it is now.
When you destroy a sovereign state, which is what we did and did without anyone’s asking us to do so, you are responsible for the water, the power, the sewage and the security of that state while you are there.
We COULD have washed off the tanks and gone home, and the independent state of Kurdistan with large oil resources would have sprung into existence almost overnight, the shiite south would have become either a satrap of Iran or a strongly aligned ally of Iran and the Sunni center would have been in some strife for survival, having neither oil nor powerful neighbouring allies. Baghdad might well have suffered a bit of ethnic cleansing. We would have had to ship a hell of a lot of heavy machinery there to make up for what we’d just blown to bits, but that probably could’ve been done. I reckon it would’ve been a better choice than what we did.
That outcome was not “acceptable” to the planners of the debacle. I think it was not bad enough for them.
They worked hard at providing just enough troops to hold the place together without actually fixing anything or securing the borders properly. Dubya enunciated the words “Bring ‘em on” to indicate that he wanted to fight the terrorists there, and the terrorists of Al-Qaeda obliged. That was the strategy. Fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here…. Iraq was not a participant on the terrorism against the US but it became a battleground. What was that about “liberating” them? “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”?
There was never ANY intention of liberating Iraq. You need to read through some of the stuff that they don’t print in the right-wing media. The intention was to keep Iraqi oil in our hands or off the market entirely and son-of-a-gun that is what has happened. The intention was to seize a strong base in the middle-east and to “grow” democracy from their into all those countries. Read the PNAC documents from 1999 when the war was being planned by the neo-con apparat.
No Mouldwarp. The word “liberate” should not ever be associated with the intentions of the leadership of the United States in the pursuit of the war in Iraq.
If we HAD left immediately there’d very likely have been a lot fewer deaths… but we didn’t and that puts the lie to every one of your conclusions about who has responsibility for what has happened in Iraq.
BJ
April 19th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
bjchip,
Some of what you say is true, but it is beside the point.
The point is that the moral responsibility for the killings and the car-bombs lies solely with those doing the killing and using the car-bombs.
End of story.
Let’s say that, after the removal of Saddam’s regime, I had jumped on a plane and flown to Iraq and started bombing marketplaces in a similar fashion. Would you blame Bush for those deaths too? I doubt it, yet there is no moral distincton to be made between me murdering people and some Sunnis or Shiites murdering people. Unless, of course, you hold Westerners to a higher moral standard than Arabs and perhaps other racial groups.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Looks like Gonzales might be a gonner.
And Wolfowitz’s deputy at the World Bank has told Wolfie that it is time to go too.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer couple of guys!