GONZALES' PRESS CONFERENCE: IS BUSH HAVING A MEDAL OF FREEDOM AWARD MADE FOR HIS ATTORNEY GENERAL?

I hate to beat a dead horse but, alas, the scandal around the gross politicization of the Justice Department is anything but a dead horse. Fact of the matter is, every department of the Bush Regime, both inside the government and outside the government (like Fox or Halliburton or most of K Street) has become a cog in the smoothly functioning wheel of the fascist party-state.

CREW is going after them... again. "CREW wants the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate potential criminal violations related to the recent dismissals of eight U.S. Attorneys. Recent revelations indicate that a top-ranking Department of Justice official knew that statements made by top Department officials were not true. Clearly, the Department of Justice cannot investigate itself and prosecute the misconduct of DOJ officials. CREW also asked the Department of Justice’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the situation."

The House Judiciary Committee just put a slew of documents up on its website that seem to show a disturbing and overwhelming pattern of the Department of Justice targeting Democrats for investigations, harassment and prosecutions. Ken wrote about it at great length yesterday and if you missed his piece and the Krugman story he published, I recommend you go back to it.

The Bush administration has been purging, politicizing and de-professionalizing federal agencies since the day it came to power. But in the past it was able to do its business with impunity; this time Democrats have subpoena power, and the old slime-and-defend strategy isn't working.

We'll have to see about that. The Democrats are far from unified. The leadership of the party caucus has been infiltrated, at the highest levels, by Insider establishment types who have far more in common with the corrupt Republican establishment than they do with the working men and women who make up the grassroots of the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi has all the right instincts but with treacherous slime like Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer surrounding her it has become extremely difficult to get any real work done. Her hands seem more and more tied by the Blue Dog shock troops employed by Hoyer and Emanuel to thwart any of the necessary real changes that will even the balance between the bipartisan Money Party and the rest of us.

Let me go back to Krugman for a moment. Yesterday he wrote that fired U.S. Attorney Carol Lam "had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. (Mr. Foggo was brought in just after the 2004 election, when, reports said, the administration was trying to purge the C.I.A. of liberals.) And she was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee." Krugman asks a question I've been shouting the answer to for a year.) I'll phrase it as an answer rather than a question.) Carol Lam was summarily fired to protect corrupt powerful Inland Empire Congressman Jerry Lewis-- who has threatened that he will not be going down alone-- and other corrupt Republicans, a long list of criminals that go right up to Bush himself. Let me go back to a question, now, that Krugman asked: "But how do Congressional investigators plan to get to the bottom of this story?"


The bottom of the story is certainly not yesterday's resignation-- and today's scapegoating-- of Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Schumer says that this isn't going away because the Bush Regime threw a scapegoat under the wheels. This would easily have worked under the rubber stamp Congress that was rejected by voters in November. Now tactics like this just incite partisan Democrats-- many of whom are far less interested in good governance than in beating up on the Republicans... who surely deserve it. I just watched Gonzales' extraordinarily defensive press conference on TV. He accepts responsibility-- "Republican responsibility"-- that has no consequences of any kind other than possibly being embarrassed. But the press conference seemed more than anything else to be an attempt to prove what Jack Cafferty said yesterday on CNN: "If you look up the word 'weasel' in the dictionary... you'll see Alberto Gonzales' picture there."