A prediction: Governor Siegelman will be far from the last victim of this "Bush III"-style administration

"As long as we have the same people in charge looking at the question of prosecutorial misconduct, we're going to get the same answers. That's because they're trying to cover their asses."

-- former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, in an

interview with TPM Muckraker (see link below)

by Ken

This is just awful. Shocking, disgraceful. If it isn't promptly repudiated and corrected by the Obama administration, I'm afraid we're going to be . . . well, exactly where we appear to be -- suffering through a presidential administration that qualifies as "moderate" only by the standard of present-day Republicanism, where "moderate" views are so extreme that not so long ago they would have qualified people who held them as mentally incompetent.

I know I'll be accused by many self-professed liberals as one of those self-hating left-wingers who believes in the old circular firing squad. Well, like a lot of other progressives, while voicing a fair amount of disagreement with the strategy and apparent goals of the Obama administration, I've held back, hoping its policymakers might have some grand plan that might not produce the results I would hope for, but that would at least move the country decisively away from the disastrous directions in which it was driven by the evil genies of the Bush regime.

Of course the crooks and clowns of the right wing of the Democratic Party, which Howie usually refers to as "the Republican wing" of the party, are never subjected to such accusations. Never. They are free to attack the administration, and it goes without saying anyone in the party to the left of Holy Joe Lieberman and Clueless Ben Nelson, at any level of vehemence. It goes without saying too that in Congress the Republican-Democrats are free not only to attackthe president's positions (that is, when he takes positions) but to vote with the "Just Say No" Republicans -- you know, the folks sworn to destroying this administration -- as often as they like.

From the White House's point of view, why not? The only Democrats who appear to have the trust of the administration's political point man, Master Rahm Emanuel, are the ones who were card-carrying Republicans until just seconds before they announced their candidacies --true believers that what's good for the giant corporations who show members of Congress with all those megabuck bribes is good for the U.S.A.

Just last week I talked about the missed opportunity of the Obama campaign to educate the country on the destructivness of the fundamental principles, not just the crappy execution, of the Bush regime.

Candidate Barack Obama had a unique opportunity during the campaign to use the international and domestic crises brought on by years of conservative misgovernance as a teaching moment, to try to make Americans understand how the conservative philosophy had failed. The explanation was something about his not wanting to be "negative," because voters don't like that. It seems clear that once in office he and his people were consciously working to avoid the onslaught of a culture war.

The result, however, is that he's got his culture war, and no weapons with which to fight back. In my darker moments what I foresee is the wreckage of this administration being used by the forces of darkness as proof of the failure of progressive ideas -- when nobody tainted with progressive ideas seems to have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Meanwhle, the "centrists" who are responsible for the carnage will as always conclude that they need to hunker ever farther toward the center, which has moved so far right as to be no longer visible to the naked eye.

By the time of the 2008 presidential primaries, and even more by the time of the general election, the Right was well advanced in the process of flushing all trace of that fellow George W. Bush down the memory hole, along with all recollection of how fiercely and violently they once defended every lie he told and every abomination he perpetrated, denouncing even the slightest hint of criticism as "Bush-bashing." By that time, the occasional right-winger who still acknowledged that there might once have been such a person -- never mind that the bum was still squatting in the White House as the duly appointed president of the United States -- explained that this (possibly hypothetical) George W. Bush person wasn't "a real conservative."

Indeed in many ways he wasn't. But "real conservatism" was already beside the point. The policies of the regime were almost down the line those of modern-day Movement Conservatism, which in many ways that isn't "conservative" either. (This contradiction is similarly built into the new initiative of RNC members who fancy themselves "pure" conservatives to purge the Republican Party of impure ones.) For example, there was nothing inherently "conservative" about the idea of invading Iraq, as reflected by the fact that, until the invasion was a reality and the Right rallied around its the spokesdevils Bush and Cheney, the loudest and most persistent voices against an invasion came from the Right. (As I've said repeatedly, the sudden and complete vanishment of those voices is for me one of the amazing feats in modern American political magic.)

Now, most of us undestood that candidate Obama wasn't a "progressive," any more than candidate Hillary Clinton was. Yet candidate Obama made a more successful effort to make us think -- with those occasional eloquent, seemingly visionary speeches, which seemed to have policy implications for what he might wish to do as president -- that he shared some of our major values, like ending the imperial adventurism of our foreign policy and restoring some measure of fairness to the administration of federal justice, which had been so brutally compromised as a matter of explicit Bush regime policy.

I understand how difficulty and risky a business it is to try to educate the electorate rather than play with or, better still, actively manipulate its misunderstandings and prejudices. Nevertheless, with the level of discontent that existed in 2008 as the country awoke to the horror of the Bush regime's disastrous policies, without necessarily understanding why those policies had been so disastrous, the country was primed for a leader who could help them see what had gone wrong, and how the country could benefit from a clean break with those policies and what an alternative vision of government might look like. Given candidate Obama's oratorical skill, his demonstrated ability to bring eloquence and clairty to fundamental aspects of public policy, he certainly seemed like a candidate to rally the American public to a renewed vision of the role government had to play in leading the country in a whole other direction. However, we heard virtually nothing in the campaign about the systemic failures of the outgoing regime, how its failures resulted primarily from a determination to prove its overriding philosophy: that government has no role in improving the lives of Americans.

Polls taken during the campaign certainly seemed to vindicate the Obama campaign's let's-look-forward-not-backward operating philosophy. It seemed that people really didn't want to hear negativity, and especially didn't want to be confronted with having to defend their previous godlike worship of George W. Bush (assuming there had ever been such a person, which seemed increasingly dubious). But sometimes leadership and political courage mean sacrificing easy short-term gains for harder-won longer-term ones.

UNLESS SENATOR OBAMA DIDN'T HAVE BASIC
BELIEF CONFLICTS WITH THE BUSH REGIME . . .

As I've been acknowledging all along, there's another possible explanation for the Obama campaign's kid-gloves treatment of the malfeasances of the Bush regime, one that goes beyond mere questions of strategy: What if his philosophical differences with it are a lot narrower than ours? As I wrote in that same post last week:

It's always dangerous to underestimate the extent to which the president's own views may actually favor the most narrowly corporatist strategy that can safely be gotten away with. A case can be made that artificially resuscitating the financial services industry (a fancy way of saying the banksters and Wall Street) actually is the president's economic program, and never mind that most of the country is still left in depression. By that standard, he and Rahm [Emanuel] and Larry [Summers] and Timmy [Geithner] can all go to bed each night feeling they've had another slammin' day and sleep the sleep of the blessed.

As you may have gathered from the head on this post, and the leading quote from former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, the subject of my current astonishment and outrage at the Obama adminstration has to do with the case of Governor Siegeleman, who seems to me almost certainly to have been railroaded -- out of a return to the governorship and into prison -- in a calculatingly cold-blooded political prosecution orchestrated by Karl Rove.

'Disappointed' Siegelman: Obama Justice Dept. Virtually The Same As Bush DOJ

Justin Elliott | November 25, 2009, 10:42AM

When the Obama Administration argued in a filing earlier this month that the Supreme Court should not consider an appeal by Don Siegelman, the former Alabama governor wasn't surprised, even though the Obama filing maintained the Bush-era stance in Siegelman's controversial corruption case.

"There's really been no substantial change in the heart of the Department of Justice from the Bush-Rove Department of Justice," Siegelman tells TPMmuckraker in an interview.

Siegelman, a Democrat, served roughly nine months in prison after his 2006 bribery conviction. He was ordered released pending appeal in March 2008. The case, which has been dogged by allegations of politicization and prosecutorial misconduct -- including links to Karl Rove -- centers on what the government called a pay-to-play scheme in which Siegelman appointed a large donor to a state regulatory board.

Siegelman has asked the Supreme Court to consider the definition of bribery, arguing that he merely engaged in routine political transactions. But, in the Nov. 13 filing that raised Siegelman's hackles, Obama's solicitor general argued that "corrupt intent" had been established in the trial.

While Solicitor General Elena Kagan was appointed by Obama, Siegelman says the DOJ staffers who are giving advice and making decisions on his case are the same people who were at the department under Bush. "The people who have been writing the briefs for the government are the same people who were involved in the prosecution," he says.

The filing by the DOJ is a sign that the Obama Administration intends to stay the course in the case, despite entreaties to review it, including a letter from 75 former state attorneys general.

If the Supreme Court declines to hear his appeal, or rules against him, the consequences could be grave, Siegelman says.

"We've got a bunch of people in this country -- including President Obama and mayors and members of Congress -- who will be in jeopardy because any rogue prosecutor who wants to target a politician or a donor will be able to do it."

He expects the court to decide whether to consider his appeal by early next year. A separate request for a new trial in Alabama will probably not be decided before the Supreme Court decision, he says.

Another piece of unfinished business in the Siegelman saga is an inquiry by the DOJ's internal watchdog -- the Office of Professional Responsibility -- into the allegations of politicized prosecution. Bill Canary, the husband of Leura Canary, the US Attorney on the case, was a state GOP operative who had run the campaign of Siegelman's gubernatorial opponent, and was a close associate of Karl Rove. Canary allegedly said he'd get his "girls" -- including his wife -- on Siegelman.

OPR said fully 11 months ago that the results of its investigation would be released "in the near future," but the report is nowhere to be seen. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in September sent a letter (.pdf) to Attorney General Eric Holder urging an impartial OPR review of the case.

Siegelman, though, isn't holding his breath. "My guess is that whatever OPR comes out with will be another whitewash designed to sweep all of this under somebody's rug," he tells us. "As long as we have the same people in charge looking at the question of prosecutorial misconduct, we're going to get the same answers. That's because they're trying to cover their asses."

[All boldface emphasis added.]

We've become used to the Obama Justice Department providing defenses of repellent laws under challenge before the Supreme Court. The finest legal minds in the progressive community have stoutly reassured us that such defenses are required under U.S. legal "tradition." (Can "tradition" really require action of any kind?) And so it was suggested that we shut our traps when, for example, the DoJ issued a shocking and loathsome defense of the repugnant Defense of Marriage Act, which even Bill Clinton now expresses remorse for having been cornered into signing. Never mind that the Supreme Court justices who read the DoJ argument could be forgiven for thinking that the Obama administration was providing a ringing endorsement for DOMA.)

But now that principle has apparently been applied to endorsing the cover-up of the first gross malfeasances of the Bush regime DoJ to come under challenge before the Supreme Court: the frame job that not only thwarted Siegelman's return to the Alabama governorship but locked him safely away in prison. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. After all, every time the question of looking into potentially criminal conduct of the Bush regimistas has arisen, hasn't President Obama always spouted the same rhetoric about not wanting to look backwards but only forward?

Did the U.S. government as a matter of official policy promote torture, in violation of both U.S. and international law? We mustn't look backwards. Did the Bush regime break U.S. law in instituting and reauthorizing its massive system of telephone surveillance, or whatever the hell it was that was so secret, we still can't be told what it was? (You remember, the whatever-it-was that brought then-White House counsel Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales storming into the intensive-care hospital room of a semiconscious Attorney General John Ashcroft, to the considerable terror of Mrs. Ashcroft, hoping to bully him into overriding the judgment of Deputy AG Jim Comey that the whatever-it-was was illegal.)

As a lot us have screamed every time President Obama has issued another of his "free passes" for Bush regime malefactors, without some basic principle of accountability, the rule of law basically disappears from U.S. government, and with it the illusion of a functioning democracy. Now the Obama administration is giving signals -- well, in the case of Governor Siegelman, more than giving signals, actually taking a position, that the Bush regime's rigorous cover-ups of its misconduct is official Obama administration policy.

We're incidentally forced to confront again the shocking number of Bush holdovers still serving, and apparently making policy, in the Obama DoJ. This is inexcusable. Presumably it was that same lofty goal of "bipartisanship" that caused the new administration to refrain from the traditional practice of requesting resignations from all the U.S. attorneys. After all, Republicans always whine indignantly when a Democratic president does it, though not when they do it. And in this case, as candidate Obama seemed to understand, the gross politicization of the DoJ was going to be one of his most immediate problems.

It's true that it would have been a nightmare getting Senate approval for all the new U.S. attorneys who would then have had to be appointed, in addition to the large number of upper-tier department managers who weren't immediately replaced, but remember, at that point no one knew it was going to be Republican strategy to oppose every single initiative and appointment of his in order to bring as much destruction and hardship to the country as they possibly could, for their own hoped future electoral benefit.

Incredibly, vast numbers of Bush regime holdovers were left in place, and in fact may still be in place, not just in the DoJ but throughout the executive branch, and it appears that many of them are formulating policy in just the same way they did during the Bush regime. It isn't clear whether their work is even being overseen by the relatively small cadre of senior-level Obama appointees who have actually been both appointed and confirmed.

I find this situation 100 percent intolerable at Justice, and feel pretty foolish for having strongly defended the appointment of Eric Holder as attorney general. At that, however, Holder is turning out to be a prototype for a lot of the Obama cabinet appointments: a qualified enough appointee, but one whose zealousness is readily accommodated to the degree desired by the administration, which seems to be "low." We're now hearing more stories from individuals with some inside knowledge of the procedure followed in the staffing of other executive-branch agencies: no hotheads wanted. So while they may not be the same people who would have been appointed to their positions under the previous administration, they're also not boat-rockers, not the kind of folks who go looking for trouble, no matter how much trouble they may have inherited in their bailiwicks.

To the extent that the policy was designed to forestall opposition attacks, it's laughable. Now that the Republicans have officially renounced any obligation to truth, not only will they oppose everything President Obama says or does, they will do so as if each of their manufactured accusations means life or death for the future of the American republic. The resulting irony is cruel: As the current administration takes over responsibility for immunizing Karl Rove from accountability for his eight years of rampaging criminal misconduct in office, the self-same Karl Rove, posing as a TV "analyst," trashes that administration at every opportunity.

If candidate Obama had announced straight-out during the campaign that it would be his policy to disregard all issues of official misconduct, including possible criminal behavior, in the Bush regime, and to maintain the basic status quo, with only some light housecleaning, in the management and even to a large extent the staffing of the executive branch, I ask myself whether I would have voted for him. With the alternative of a McCranky administration? (No, I'm not going to resort to mention of who the Republican vice president would have been. After all, Young Johnny held her in such little regard that she surely would have had no policy role in his administration. In fact, she might have wound up making as much trouble as she has tried to make for the Obama administration.) More to the point, I'm appalled even to be pondering the question of how much worse, or rather how not-so-much-worse, a McCranky adminstration would have been.

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