Laws? We don't follow no stinkin' laws! We're the desperados of the Bush regime!

No results yet in Al Kamen's "Guess what burned in the fire in Vice President Cheney's Eisenhower Executive Office Building digs" contest, but Al does have a fresh demonstration, in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column today, of the hilarious way the Right-Wing Crime Machine games the rules*:

Longing for the Land of Beer and Chocolate
One of President Bush's most high-profile recess appointees, Ambassador to the European Union C. Boyden Gray-- is back in Washington and, for the moment, out of a job.

Gray was given a recess appointment to the Brussels job two years ago after then-minority Senate Democrats blocked his confirmation. Gray, White House counsel under Bush I, had infuriated Democrats by leading a campaign for confirmation of several conservative Bush judicial nominations.

That appointment expired last week, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has effectively eliminated the presidential power to make recess appointments.

But Gray still may be returning to Brussels.

There is buzz that the White House wants to name Gray as Bush's "special envoy" to the European Union, a position that doesn't require Senate confirmation and apparently would not give him supervisory authority over mission officials.

Wait a minute. Didn't Bush's first National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD1) abolish all these special envoys? That may mean Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has to give special permission for Gray's new appointment.

Gray probably is allowed to have an office at the mission -- hey, the ambassador's office is empty! -- but it's unclear whether he'll live in the ambassador's residence. A section in the State Department's manual appears to say he can't. (Of course Gray, heir to a tobacco fortune, can afford to rent a decent condo, or a palace, for the next year.) Reid, through a spokesman, said yesterday that he "strongly opposes giving Gray all the perks of a position he no longer holds, that such a move would violate the spirit of" a recent Senate-White House agreement on recess appointments and that it "may have reverberations in terms of the White House's ability to actually confirm ambassadors." As the election nears, of course, that ability is minimal at best.

There remains the question of why Gray, a high-powered Washington lawyer and policy wonk, wants to go back to the oft-somnolent E.U. job. Maybe he likes Brussels? Maybe it's near Paris?

*By "rules" I mean what are sometimes known as "laws," a quaintly old-fashioned term that now seems misleading, in that it suggests that these niggling statutory requirements and prohibitions should at least be taken into account if not actually followed by people up to and including the president of the U.S. of A. This we now know is bunk--as long as the president is a wingnut scumbag.

Our prediction, now that Scumbag-in-Chief "Big Dick" has established his millennial Unitary Imperial Presidency, is that the moment the new Democratic president attempts to exercise even the most clearly established, constitutionally and legislatively based authority, he or she will immediately be subjected to 24/7 savaging by the full blast of the Right-Wing Attack Machine, which so loathes America that it will never rest until everything that is good and decent about it is turned into wingnut poop.--Ken

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