So what would YOU have said at the opening of Chimpy the Ex-Prez's (giggle) library?

Perhaps the elder former President Bush was learning this afternoon that his boy George now has a library bearing his name?

by Ken

For starters, this whole business of the launch of the Chimpy the Ex-Prez Immemorial Presidential Library has the unmistakable ring of waiting a decade to deliver the punch line of a joke. After all, it wasn't that deep into the criminal nincompoop's constitution-shredding that wags -- like those of NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! -- were already riffing on this eventual spectacle. It might have been, but probably wasn't, Mo Rocca who answered the question of what you might put in such a facility with the suggestion of pop-up books.

This was, after all, a man who had spent his life farting at the values for which we turn to libraries, notably the gathering and sharing of knowledge. This at least was relatively benign -- "live and let live" might have characterized Chimpy's relationship to knowledge through most of his adult existence. But his catastrophic tenure in the White House was anything but benign with regard to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. Over those eight years the federal government did everything in its power to undermine, even destroy knowledge-based values. There were many dimensions to the Bush regime's monstrousness, and I would certainly never underrate its war-crimes-fueled assault on workable and just international relations, but the unbridled savagery of its war on knowledge always seemed, and still seems to me, the apex of its monstrousness.

Somehow, even though I was home all day, I seem to have missed coverage of the actual festivities, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that such was not the tone of the encomia delivered by the speakers, including the current president and all the other living exes.

I'm sure it would be easy to shred what each of them actually said, and I trust that's being done. It's important, because otherwise the inevitable result is to forget the degree of monstrousness of the Bush regime. Which I'm afraid is what appears to be happening -- and in the absence of any impulse to truth-telling seems all but inevitable. There's no question that disappearing was one of the shrewdest -- or luckiest -- things the Chimpster ever did. Remember that by the time the stiff slunk out of the White House he was virtually a forgotten person

I heard on the radio this morning that President Obama's strategy was going to be praising Chimpy for his relatively enlightened position on immigration. Chimpy was, after all, a representative of the 1% who have always understood the importance of this pool of rock-bottom-price, rights-free labor. And as far as it goes, that's a smartish strategy, and never mind that Chimpy the Prez was singularly unable to do anything about his relatively enlightened immigration position. And so, in the desperate quest to find something positive you can say about Chimpy from a policy standpoint, you wind up paying tribute to one of his failures.

However, the real problem with such a strategy is that, in the interest of politeness, it winds up whitewashing all of the Bush regime's monstrous doings. Still, what are you going to do? If you're stuck appearing at such an event, even if you want to honor truth and decency, what the heck can you say?

"He never endorsed criminalizing possession of a library card."

"He never participated in any actual book-burnings that we know of."

"He did marry a librarian, after all."

No, it seems to me that the only hope is not appearing at the event. But how do you manage that?

Dear George,

I'm sorry to have to tell you at this late date that Barack won't be able to attend your library opening because I'm making him clean out the garage. You wouldn't believe how bad it's gotten! He says that if I won't let him come to your shindig, I should be the one to break the news, so here it is.

Have a great opening! Best to Laura.

Yours,

Michelle O

The problem with a last-minute blow-off, though, is that by then it will have been necessary to prepare and circulate a text for the president's remarks. The only far-enough-ahead thing I could think of would be along these lines:

Dear President Bush:

My dad asked me to write to let you know that he will be unable to attend the opening of your presidential library because it conflicts with our dog Bo's obedience class. He says he hopes you'll think of him again the next time you open a new place. Just between us, have you thought of a BBQ restaurant?

Sincerely,

Malia Obama

Once you're committed to speaking, I don't see how our rules of sociopolitical decorum allow you to do anything but lie.

THE FOLKS IN THE THINKPROGRESS WAR ROOM AREN'T
BOUND BY THE RULES OF SOCIOPOLITICAL DECORUM

Miss Him Yet? 13 Reasons to Be Glad George W. Bush Is No Longer President

• Authorized the use of torture
• Politicized climate science
• Ignored Afghanistan to launch a war in Iraq
• Botched the response to Hurricane Katrina
• Defunded stem cell research
• Required Muslim men to register with the government
• Reinstated the global gag rule
• Supported anti-gay discrimination
• Further deregulated Wall Street
• Widened income inequality
• Undermined worker protections
• Ideological court appointments
• Presided over a dysfunctional executive branch

You can read the detailed explanations for yourself onsite. And I would say that even these "reasons" are more respectfully drawn up than I would have managed. At least they've got the basic idea right.

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Take a bow, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara -- scourge of kook corruption

A madcap novel of the sloppiest turf war ever launched by the Brooklyn mob. Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking -- if only Kid Sally weren't a Grade A moron. . .

-- from the Reader Store overview of the 1969 Jimmy Breslin novel based on the life of Mafioso "Crazy Joey" Gallo

by Ken

Or as the publisher's description of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (which you'll find on book sites all over the Internet) puts it, Kid Sally is "a would-be capo who 'couldn't run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers' cars.' " (The role was played in the much-enjoyed film version by a newcomer named Robert De Niro, who was cast when another young actor, Al Pacino, pulled out to play Michael Corleone in a big-money picture to be made based on Mario Puzo's The Godfather.)

So what does The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight have to do with the price of eggs? Well, the publisher's description notes that "the title has entered into the language as a catch phrase," and as the New York media overflow with tales of local political corruption, it's the image that keeps coming to mind.

The other day Howie walked us through the great breaking story about the roundup of a few NYS pols and assorted other characters in a grand conspiracy of electoral corruption ("Queens State Senator Malcolm Smith And A Gaggle Of Corrpt Republicans Arrested By The FBI"). It's a story that would have been even funnier if Jimmy Breslin were around to write it -- a story about a network of payoffs involving a phony Indian money guy named "Raj" and an Orthodox Jewish wheeler-dealer named "Mo" who was real but, alas for the conspirators, an already-cooperating witness.

All of this in the service of a scheme so preposterous -- and also, we should stress, so inconsequential -- as to represent a slander on any self-respecting corrupt pol. It all revolved around getting "Wilson Pikula"s, a peculiarly NYS institution, to enable washed-up African-American Democratic Queens State Senator Malcolm into the Republican mayoral primaries in NYC's five counties, where he would have had absolutely zero chance of doing anything except embarrassing. That is, even if a bunch of the bribe-takers hadn't taken the money and then reneged on their promises. (This possibility, we know from the government tapes, actually had occurred to Senator Smith. He just never figured out any way of dealing with it.)

I can't say I've read deeply in the paperwork that's been made available, but still -- really, now! As far as I can tell, there wasn't even any public money changing hands. Sure, if there were public officials taking bribes, they should be dealt with, though as soon as one learns that the crooked wheels of this conspiracy were oiled by a cooperating witness, one can be forgiven for wondering whether this whole nutty scheme would have been hatched, let alone gone anywhere, without government support.

Yet there it is: "political corruption," stopped dead in its tracks by the FBI at the behest of the fearless corruption-fighting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. The other "corruption" scandals we've been hearing about from unflinching prosecutors -- both financial and political -- aren't as colorful, or entertaining, but they seem to me every bit as inconsequential.

Does anyone imagine for a second that any aspect of this nonsense has anything to do with the mountain of financial and political corruption, real corruption, that New York, both city and state, are choking under? The kind where the big-money players using influence and cash either to siphon money out of the public till or, more frequently, to manipulate the craven political actors to do their bidding and ensure a supercharged return on their investment?

Yet just the other day, DNAinfo.com, from which I've come to expect better, was touting: "Preet Bharara, New Sheriff of Albany, Eyed for Higher Office":

He's the star prosecutor who, in one week, has taken down one state senator, two assemblymen, a councilman and two GOP bosses in two alleged bribery plots that have rocked the political world.

And he hints more heads will roll.

It's just the latest in a series of high-profile catches for Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has spent the last four years lassoing one corrupt city politician after the next — fueling renewed speculation that the self-appointed Sheriff of Albany might harbor political ambitions of his own. . . .

Bharara has spent the past four years in the headlines and splashed across magazine covers for his work taking down corrupt politicians, prosecuting terror suspects and insider trading, and recovering stolen cash, including the largest-known recovery in municipal contract fraud in U.S. history following the CityTime debacle.

This week, his takedowns included Queens State Sen. Malcolm Smith, City Councilman Daniel Halloran and Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson in connection with two elaborate alleged bribery schemes, including one that tried to get Smith on the ballot for New York City mayor.

Since August 2009, he has nabbed a whopping 15 elected officials and associates in public corruption cases, including State Sen. Carl Kruger, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, and Councilman Larry Seabrook, who was sentenced to five years behind bars. To highlight his cases, the office created a colorful chart featuring all the names, positions, charges and outcomes of each of the arrests.

Non-New Yorkers may be forgiven for assuming that this roster of "elected officials and associates" must matter. Trust me, these are nobodies -- if possible, less-than-nobodies. Oddballs and odd men out, what we might call "kook corruption." Can we expect some poor schlepp of a state assemblyman to be tagged for collusion with a bunch of circus clowns getting out of a Volkswagen?

Whereas does anyone believe for a second that New York City (and State) isn't chock full of somebodies and supersomebodies in urgent need of indicting? The kinds of people who are tied into the kind of people who are real movers and shakers, and in their corruption make our political and financial cuture stink to high heaven?

Do we really have to ask, for example, how many prosecutions the U.S. attorney for the Southern District has launched involving actual actors in the financial meltdown that followed the blowing of the housing bubble? Is anyone else getting the feeling that, hand in hand with the financial concept of "too big to fail," we now have a legal category of candidate felons who are "too big to touch"?

In the nauseating DNAinfo.com puff piece, amid speculation that jobs Preet Bharara might be angling for are U.S. attorney general and director of the FBI, there is this curious note:

But one source in the Justice Department noted that, given the current political climate, there are not many open jobs for Bharara, who formerly served as chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer, leading the 2006 Congressional investigation into the firings of United States attorneys under the Bush administration.

Now this is tantalizing, though I can't say for sure I know what it means. Is the idea that Preet is tainted for being too tough, too willing to investigate? We can't tell, because nothing more is made of it.

And all I can recall of what should have been one of the great scandals of the "Chimpy" Bush administration -- the politicization of the entire Executive Branch, including most unforgivably the Justice Department -- never became a scandal of any consequence. Faced with the stark perversion of the administration of law enforcement by the federal government, there should have been a rash of headlines, firings, indictments, and people in high places spending millions of dollars on PR "handlers."

Somehow it didn't happen, though. I'm sure Senator Schumer and his stalwart chief counsel tried their darnedest, but somehow it just wasn't good enough.

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Gloriosky! Now the administration is supposed to tiptoe around the imagined "goodwill" of congressional Republicans who don't have any?

"What they saw through those yellow-gold lenses, they never forgot. And neither will you, my friends." After all these decades since I last saw this episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller, "The Cheaters," from 1960, I find that the whole darned thing is on YouTube! We learn from Boris K that the old-time Dutch scientist who created the Cheaters and then boldly looked into a mirror "hanged himself before dawn."


"The choice of a successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state has turned into an unexpectedly nasty political fight that could cost the White House valuable goodwill with Republicans."

-- from "Fight over Susan Rice holds political risks for White House," by the Washington Post's Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson

by Ken

The quotation above from Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson's WaPo piece is in fact the story's lead, and it's about as far as I got -- running into that astonishing phrase "valuable goodwill" as applied to congressional Republicans.

"Valuable goodwill"? From these pestilential vermin? I'm tempted to say that there isn't a neuron's worth of goodwill, not to mention honesty or decency, residing anywhere inside the carcases of life forms like Young Johnny McCranky, Lindsey Graham, or Susan Collins, but that probably isn't so. It would probably be more correct that these life forms have mastered the skill of suppressing any impulse to goodwill, honesty, or decency that happens to pop into their consciousness.

The other day when Susasn Rice bearded the lions as it were, sashaying into the den of the right-wing foreign-policy sociopaths, I understood the logic, and even had a certain admiration for it. The vilification they were performing on her, after all, was almost wholly irrational and counterfactual, so why not step right up and try to set the record straight?

Ambassador Rice found out why not, and I'm afraid that came as no surprise whatsoever to me, because she wasn't dealing with people with either functioning ethics or reason. They're savage beasts driven solely by the dark screeching of their deep-seated loathsomeness. And so, instead of clearing the air, their session seems to have breathed even more toxic fumes into the miasma of their America-loathing psychosis and their compulsion to turn the country into a mirror of their fundmental evil.

Now I hold no brief for Rice, but as yet no one has shown any significant offense committed by anyone in the U.S. government in connection with the lethal assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Personally, the thread I would most like to see pursued, is the possible culpability of mentally defective congressional Republicans in denying the State Dept. adequate funds to protect its people around the world. But that won't happen, because Republicans consider that they have carte blanche to commit any form of criminal behavior as long as it's in the service of their murderous ideological psychosis.

So primitive monsters like the McCranky, Graham, and Collins demons should feel free to pursue their witch hunt just as soon as they deal, finally, with the years-long history of indisputable raging monstrous criminality of the foreign-policy of the Bush regime. They will truly have performed a public service when we get to see justice done to everyone involved in those many years' worth of that lethal combination of mass-murderous war crimes and the Great Wall of Lies the conspirators threw up to try to conceal their malefaction from public view. I'm thinking of an assembly line of the murdering hoodlums filing up to a dais, commencement-style, for the administering of their lethal injections. With Chimpy the Then-Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney either leading the way or bringing up the rear -- I'm open to discussion on the point.

At that point it will become appropriate for congresscreeps -- any of them still alive and kicking, that is -- to consider the appropriateness of a slap on the wrist for Ambassador Rice for passing on the intelligence talking points about the Benghazi raid as they were given to her.

A more worthwhile use of the congresscreeps' time, however, would be to pursue the quest of that old Dutch scientist who created the Cheaters. As Boris K explains in the intro to the episode, it's only through the final custodian of those mysterious glasses, which enable the viewer to see the truth, that we learn what they were actually created for. They were created to enable the beholder to look into a mirror and see the truth about himself -- with unanticipatedly fatal consequences.

No doubt there are many Democrats who would benefit from this same exercise. But I'm hard put to think of any Republicans who would survive it. Certainly none of the Senate Republican Psychos.

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The Labor Dept. under Hilda Solis gives us a glimpse of how this administration could be working

"Without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his column yesterday (see below)

by Ken

The "Under the Radar" item in Tuesday's Progress Report from Think Progress tipped us off to a New Year's Day AP Business Week report that began:

Labor moves quickly on job safety, workers' rights

By SAM HANANEL

WASHINGTON -- Soon after she became the nation's labor secretary, Hilda Solis warned corporate America there was "a new sheriff in town." Less than a year into her tenure, that figurative badge of authority is unmistakable.

Her aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules.

The changes are a departure from the policies of Solis' predecessor, Elaine Chao. They follow through on President Barack Obama's campaign promise to boost funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, increase enforcement and safeguard workers in dangerous industries.

Solis made a splash in October when OSHA slapped the largest fine in its history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery.

Garnering less attention, she just finished hiring 250 new investigators to protect workers from being cheated out of wage and overtime pay. She also started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate. And she is proposing new standards to protect workers from industrial dust explosions -- an effort the Bush administration had long resisted.

Some business groups say they prefer a more cooperative approach between government and businesses -- what the Bush administration called "compliance assistance." . . .

These are, of course, the "business groups" that can be counted on to let out a wounded roar anytime they don't get their way, which is their definition of being "anti-business." Which just goes to show that they haven't learned even the First Lesson of August 2008: that anyone who gives "business groups" everything they want can expect big-time trouble. These people are like children -- especially whiny and, it has to be said, thuggish children -- the kiddies from Lord of the Flies, say. They are incapable of checking their truly insatiable greed, and are prepared to destroy any number of economies in its pursuit.

Put the Republicans in charge of the economy, and it's just a matter of when and how bad the meltdown is going to be. They talk a lot about some mythical "free market," but of course the last thing they want is a truly free market. It's government's job to pave the way for, and grind into dust anyone who opposes, the free expression of their limitless greed. You know, the way the Bush regimistas did so spendidly.

One key component of the scheme is making sure you've always got your heel on the throat of labor. Corporations, you see, must have all the rights -- and none of the obligations -- of humans, but humans, if they happen to be working stiffs, have no rights, or at least none that they don't have to fight for tooth and claw.

And so in Republican administrations, the ideal -- hard to obtain but worth striving for -- is to derail the Department of Labor from its mandated function of protecting the labor force to its opposite, turning it into a functional Anti-Labor Department, the wedge of the organized effort to protect management from any rights mere laborers may try to claim. Previous administrations have striven for this anti-labor nirvana; I don't believe any has achieved it to anything like the degree that the Bush Anti-Labor Department under Elaine Chao did.

The philosophy apparently goes something like this: We value our workforce so much that we are prepared to continue paying them -- the absolute minimum possible, of course -- until they fall, and then goodness knows there are plenty more laborers where that poor sod came from. Probably the Bush regime's most successful area of job creation was the ones that opened up as a result of the Labor Department's "reluctance," to put it mildly, to enforce safety regulations. Hey, every miner who died opened up an available mining job.

If we can believe the AP report on the functioning of the Labor Department under Secretary Hilda Solis, for once it's clear that we had an election in 2008 in which people voted for change. Here's more of the Think Progress Report:

In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery."

[Note: The original text is studded with links.]

Now clearly none of this could be happening against the wishes of the Oval Office, but we have to give credit to Secretary Solis herself for (a) understanding her job very differently from the way her predecessor did, and (b) turning the wreckage of her department around and making it function in the interest of working people. It was shocking to read once again in Mary Jean Collins's DWT post last night, "Happy(?) Anniversary, Dawn Johnsen!," how casual the Obama administration remains about getting the Justice Department staffed and working.

We can't say we're surprised by the job Secretary Solis is doing. Because of Howie's nearness to her old congressional district, he's had a lot of opportunity to observe her at work, and she's remained a proud, committed progressive. It's why Blue America included her in our endorsements. It's not that her reelection was ever in doubt in her safely Democratic district, but that we hoped to add to her visibility and clout in Congress, or as Howie puts it, "to help her increase her profile so she would one day be a contender for a governorship, Senate seat-- or cabinet position." Another budding progressive powerhouse, Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, is the first endorsee of Blue America '10, and we hope you'll keep checking the Blue America '10 page to see the candidates we and our friends at Digby's Hullabaloo and Crooks and Liars are satisfied are worthy of progressive support.


POSTSCRIPT: HAROLD MEYERSON POINTS OUT
TODAY'S LACK OF A PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

"Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform," Harold Meyerson began his Washington Post column yesterday ("Without a movement, progressives can't aid Obama's agenda"), and that sure got my attention. "The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society -- a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society -- are the templates that fire the liberal imagination."

[Liberals] have responded to the election of every Democratic president since LBJ -- each of whom entered office with a substantial Democratic majority in Congress -- with the hope that this time would be different, that a new burst of progressivism was at hand.

And each time, they have been disappointed. While Carter and Clinton could both point to progressive legislation enacted during their terms, many of their most significant achievements -- the deregulation of transportation, the consolidation and deregulation of finance, the abolition of welfare, the enactment of trade agreements with low-wage nations -- actually eroded the economic security that Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson and their congressional contemporaries had worked to hard to create.

And even though Obama "took office at a moment when the intellectual force of laissez-faire economics was plainly spent," and came in with a reform agenda that "was nothing if not ambitious,"

as the first anniversary of his inauguration approaches, it's clear that despite the impending enactment of a genuinely epochal expansion of health care, a progressive era has not burst forth. Major legislation languishes or is watered down. Right-wing pseudo-populism stalks the land. The liberal base is demobilized. The '30s or the '60s it ain't.

Meyerson notes some of the "reasons for the stillbirth of the new progressive era": "the death of liberal and moderate Republicanism, the reluctance of some administration officials and congressional Democrats to challenge the banks, the ever-larger role of money in politics (see reluctance to challenge banks, above), the weakness of labor, the dysfunctionality of the Senate." But, he says, "if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement."

He looks back at "the America over which FDR presided" and sees "mass organizations of the unemployed," farmers' groups, militant unions, communiss and democratic socialists who "were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression." In LBJ's time, the civil rights movement "provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms."

In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.

The construction of social movements is always a bit of a mystery. The right has had great success over the past year in building a movement that isn't really for anything but that has channeled anew the fears and loathings of millions of Americans. If Glenn Beck can help do that for the right, can't, say, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann help build a movement against the banks or for jobs programs? It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's.

The most exciting political development of recent times has been the emergence of the progressive blogosphere. We know there's a lot of support out there for progressive principles, with a lot of heat behind it. The question then is, how do we translate that passion to the kind of force that moves the likes of Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid?

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Rachel M on Jim DeMoron's excellent trip: "Is it maybe a word that starts with T and rhymes with reason?"

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note blog was Rachel's guest Thursday night, talking about Senator DeMoron's then-planned Trip of Treason (my term, not Steve's or Rachel's).

by Ken

THE HILL'S BLOG BRIEFING ROOM

DeMint encouraged by Honduras trip
By Eric Zimmermann - 10/03/09 11:06 AM ET

The Honduran government is upholding the rule of law and supporting democracy, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said after returning from a fact-finding trip to the country.

DeMint led a delegation including Reps. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), and Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) The lawmakers met with Honduran President Roberto Micheletti, Supreme Court justices, and candidates in upcoming November 29 elections.

"[W]e saw a government working hard to follow the rule of law, uphold its constitution, and to protect democracy for the people of Honduras," DeMint said. "We are very encouraged by what we saw and we hope to be able to work with our administration to support the upcoming elections."

DeMint added that he'd have more to say after he briefed his Senate colleagues. . . .

So Senator DeMoron, the pride of South Carolina (well, who then? Sen. Lindsey "I'm Dumber and Dishonester Than My Pal Holy Joe Lieberman" Graham? Gov. Mark "Hiking the Appalachian Trail to Argentina" Sanford? the gaggle of GOP geese angling to fill the shoes of the ex-governor-to-be?) has made his euphemistically described "fact-finding" trip to Honduras. This is a man who has spent his entire political life running at breakneck speed from any possible encounter with facts -- the next fact he meets head-on will be his first. But I wouldn't worry too much about that. To be a Republican and a dead-right-winger in 2009 means having developed utter imperviousness to the penetration of anything resembling a fact.

Of course we all know Senator DeMoron's purpose in going, as he was making clear before he discovered that it might be a tad impolitic to say so, was to give aid and comfort to the military junta there, recognized neither by the United States nor Honduras's neighbors, to encourage them to stand firm against any impulse even to compromise, let alone give in. Hey, was he supposed to stand idly by while there were fascists or authoritarians to rally behind?

There was some minor embarrassment for the senator when somebody broke the news to him that his Honduran heroes had suspended civil liberties, though again it probably had to be explained to him that suspending civil liberties is considered a public-relations gaffe in some American circles. After all, suspending civil liberties has become one of the major goals of Republican governance -- and was regarded by DeMoron and his colleagues as one of the great achievements of the Bush regime. It probably also had to be explained to him why his junta hosts were prattling on about aspiring to follow the rule of law and hoping to restore democracy, since again Republican administrations in the U.S. over the last 30 years have worked so hard to eliminate both.

My one question would be a request for confirmation that Senator DeMoron made his statement from his jail cell, presumably adjoining those of Representatives Schock, Roskam, and Lamborn, waiting for their arraignments on charges of treason and whatever other crimes apply. Presumably Senate Minority Leader Miss Mitch McConnell is in a cell nearby as a coconspirator.

You'll recall that Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was left looking kind of foolish because he managed to deny transport for DeMoron's Trip of Treason -- what else could we call it when a U.S. senator takes his defiance of U.S. foreign policy so far as to collude with an illegitimate foreign government? -- only to be end-run by the wily DeMoron, who went to Miss Mitch, who arranged transport through the Pentagon. (I assume the Defense Dept. employees who facilitated the deal have been fired, pending the filing of charges against them too.)

IT'S TIME TO PLAY . . . IF THE SHOE
WERE ON THE OTHER FOOT

Really, we don't have to delve deeply into the ins and outs or rights and wrongs of our policy toward the Honduran junta. All we have to do is play another round of that favorite parlor game, If the Political Shoe Were on the Other Foot.

I realize this is tiresome, but it becomes all the more necessary as long as the extremist-tamed infotainment-news media remain engulfed in oblivion with regard to the "principles" and operating methods of the Just Say No Republican Party. So it's left to us to imagine the scenario, if a Democrat had engaged in such behavior during a Republican administration. We know we would have the Right-Wing Noise Machine in full bloodthirsty screech mode, not to be quieted without some blood sacrifices.

As we know, any action on behalf of decency and honor is persecuted by the Rabid Right to the fullest extent of their subversive powers. They themselves, however, are never held to account, never asked to pay a price for their lies, subversions, and outright crimes. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to Senator DeMoron's treason trial. I assume prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty.


UPDATE: Ken Isn't The Only One Noticing That DeMint Is A Screwball

Over the weekend Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), the fourth ranking Republican House leader, chair of the Republican Policy Committee, told a conference of party leaders and activists that DeMint is "nuts" (his word). The audience laughed and applauded, Watch:

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Obama administration to Bush regimistas: Not to worry, we've got your back

No, nobody got off at Nuremberg because they were "only following orders," but at Nuremberg we at least tried to make sure the people who gave the orders were prosecuted.

"I applaud Attorney General Holder’s decision to appoint a prosecutor to review the shocking violations of law that took place under the Bush administration. We cannot simply sweep these abuses under the rug. This investigation should not be limited to those who carried out interrogations or to whether the abuses they engaged in were officially sanctioned. The abuses that were officially sanctioned amounted to torture and those at the very top who authorized, ordered or sought to provide legal cover for them should be held accountable.”

-- Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), in a statement issued this afternoon

(As Zachary Roth reported for TPMMuckraker, similar sentiments were voiced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy of Vermont and, in a joint statement, by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan and Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York.)

by Ken

On torture, on the political subversion of the Justice Department, the Homeland Security Department, and everything else in the Executive Branch, on the campaign of lies that took the country to war -- on just about any issue of American governance in the yeas 2001-08, there is so much misconduct that's in urgent need of investigation with a view to whatever prosecutions may still be possible that it's hard to believe the only one the Obama administration has so far seen fit to pursue is into actual acts of torture by CIA interrogators. (As I write, rumors are in the air that one result, not yet explained, may be the resignation of CIA director Leon Panetta.)

With the five-year-old CIA inspector general's report now released, and the attorney general in possession of a report by his department's Office of Professional Responsibility, the adminstration clearly wants to appear on top of the issue. First, President Obama announced that the decision of whether to prosecute anyone would be left entirely to Attorney General Eric Holder, and then the AG announced that he has appointed John Durham, "a longtime federal prosecutor from Connecticut" (seen here in 2006 when then-AG Judge Malarkey named him to investigate the case of the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes), as the NYT's David Johnston and Jeff Zeleny put it, "to examine nearly a dozen prisoner abuse cases in which detainees were held by the Central Intelligence Agency." Among those cases are four that are being reopened after being closed by Bush regime self-investigators.

Should these people be prosecuted? I don't know. I'm not crazy about the idea of them going un-punished, but really, in terms of sending messages, is this one anywhere near the top of the list of those we need to be broadcasting? Yes of course, the U.S. officially rejects the "I was only following orders" defense, as we made clear in the Nuremberg prosecutions after World War II. But for goodness' sake, at Nuremberg we didn't have low-level flunkies being tried while the people who gave the orders were going scot-free.

Now that the U.S. political opposition has adopted the Rule of Lies and Lawlessness as its basic operating principle, it should be more painfully clear than ever that people in this country who get their hands on the levers of power will try to get away with absolutely anything they don't believe they're likely to be appropriately punished for. The perpetrators and their enthusiasts are, of course, the very same people who are wont to lecture the rest of us about the importance of law and order. I'd laugh if it was funny.

You've got to congratulate the attorney general for what amounts to a lose-lose proposition. His move is likely to be fairly unpopular politically among Americans who haven't been helped to understand why prosecuting government lawbreakers is so important (the standard explanation for why so little serious investigation of Bush era criminality has been investigated), as well with members of supporters of the president who don't understand why his administration doesn't grasp this either, while at the same time accomplishing hardly anything toward correcting the problem of government machinery that approved and executed a torture policy.

Hey, I'm just improvising here, but maybe in the future we can just make sure the people who carry out our torture policies aren't government employees. Maybe we could hire, like, contractors to do our dirty work for us, beyond the reach of the law.

The pathetically limited reach of the law, I should have said.

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E. J. Dionne Jr. nails the issue of the "right" to carry weapons in the vicinity of the president (PLUS: Harold Meyerson on the shrunken GOP)

Mark Streeter in the Savannah Morning News

"The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them. . . .

"Will some group of responsible conservatives, preferably life members of the NRA, have the decency to urge their followers to leave their guns at home when they go out to protest the president? Is that too much to ask?"

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
today, "Leave The Guns At Home"

by Ken

During the eight unrelentingly lawless years of the Bush regime, at almost every turn developments cried out for a round of "If the shoe were on the other foot." And now that the soldiers of the Bush crime machine are mostly purged from the government bunkers they befouled those eight years (there are still holdovers reporting for work daily, aren't there?), though not yet in the prison cells where most of them belong, the craziness they fostered has only gotten crazier.

I've been on online listservs where people are in shock over the absence of a deafening uproar at the right-wing scumbaggers -- oops, I meant teabaggers -- who have taken to making a show of carrying weapons to the sites of presidential appearances, living up to their calling as totalitarian thugs and anti-democratic intimidators. And I have to say, my shocked colleagues have a point. Where is the outrage? Can you imagine the Bush-Cheney security apparatus allowing anyone with a weapon in the same county as one of their officials?

As I argued recently, the chances that this is what the original intenders of the Constitution had in mind with the Second Amendment seem to me nonexistent. The current extremist majority on the Supreme Court -- a majority, that is, when poor Justice Anthony Kennedy blows their way -- may have had its reasons for wishing to unleash a wave of political-gang violence in the country, but those reasons have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution, whether read literally or seen through the prism of "original intent."

At the president's appearance in Phoenix Monday

One day a Supreme Court majority made up of sane people who know how to read will undo the mischief of the radical anti-constitutionalists of the Roberts Court and correct their fundamental misreading of the Second Amendment, which addresses the need for "a well-regulated militia," a need that is now met by our rather sizable standing armed forces as well as the states' National Guards. Those future justices will probably be too polite to inquire how five of their predecessors managed to get their heads wedged so far up their butts, but they may well point to the incitement to civilian violence laid by their Far Right activism, and wonder how the provocations and intimidation of the scumbaggers related to the need for a well-regulated militia.

People are pointing a finger at the Secret Service, which is unfair. I can't imagine they're happy about the presence of guns where they're on the job, but I'm guessing they're voicing their displeasure as forcefully as they can. A comparison with Bush-Cheney security is unfair, because the Bush regime clearly had the security apparatus of any totalitarian regime, which proceeds from the generally well-founded assumption that it has enemies everywhere.

Of course there was never much reporting on the Bush-Cheney security operation. I expect that any reporter enterprising enough to try to report on the subject would have had it made clear that doing so would have been regarded as a breach of national security and would have been dealt with accordingly. Nevertheless, we got occasional glimpses of the scope and thoroughness of the operation, like when people were thrown out of gatherings -- and even roughed up and arrested -- for wearing unsupportive T-shirts, or when Chimpy the Prez traveled, and it seemed as if entire countries had to be displaced to provide a large enough security perimeter for the Tiny One.

All of which is a prelude to calling the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr. to the witness stand. Boy, did he nail this in his column today:

Leave The Guns At Home

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush?

How would our friends on the right have reacted to someone at a Reagan or a Bush speech carrying a sign that read: "It is time to water the tree of liberty"? That would be a reference to Thomas Jefferson's declaration that the tree "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Pardon me, but I don't think conservatives would have spoken out in defense of the right of every American Marxist to bear arms or to shed the blood of tyrants.

In fact, the Bush folks didn't like any dissent at all. Recall the 2004 incident in which a distraught mother whose son was killed in Iraq was arrested for protesting at a rally in New Jersey for first lady Laura Bush. The detained woman wasn't even armed. Maybe if she had been carrying, the gun lobby would have defended her.

The Obama White House purports to be open to the idea of guns outside the president's appearances. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said on Tuesday. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."

Gibbs made you think of the old line about the liberal who is so open-minded he can't even take his own side in an argument.

What needs to be addressed is not the legal question but the message that the gun-toters are sending.

This is not about the politics of populism. It's about the politics of the jackboot. It's not about an opposition that has every right to free expression. It's about an angry minority engaging in intimidation backed by the threat of violence.

There is a philosophical issue here that gets buried under the fear that so many politicians and media-types have of seeming to be out of touch with the so-called American heartland.

The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them.

On the contrary, violence and the threat of violence have always been used by those who wanted to bypass democratic procedures and the rule of law. Lynching was the act of those who refused to let the legal system do its work. Guns were used on election days in the Deep South during and after Reconstruction to intimidate black voters and take control of state governments.

Yes, I have raised the racial issue, and it is profoundly troubling that firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president's public events only now, when the president is black. Race is not the only thing at stake here, and I have no knowledge of the personal motivations of those carrying the weapons. But our country has a tortured history on these questions, and we need to be honest about it. Those with the guns should know what memories they are stirring.

And will someone please tell the armed demonstrators how foolish and lawless they make our country look in the eyes of so much of the world? Are we not the country that urges other nations to see the merits of the ballot over the bullet?

All this is taking place as the country debates the president's health-care proposal. There is much that is disturbing in that discussion. Shouting down speakers is never a good thing, and many lies are being told about the contents of the health-care bills. The lies should be confronted, but freedom involves a lot of commotion and an open contest of ideas, even when some of the parties say things that aren't true and act in less than civil ways.

Yet if we can't draw the line at the threat of violence, democracy begins to disintegrate. Power, not reason, becomes the stuff of political life. Will some group of responsible conservatives, preferably life members of the NRA, have the decency to urge their followers to leave their guns at home when they go out to protest the president? Is that too much to ask?

Dionne is a fine and sensible writer whose regular columnizing efforts become all the more important as the Post's editorial pages become more and more overwhelmingly right-wing. Some days, though, he rises above and beyond. Here he has tackled a Big Subject head-on, and done it about as well as I can imagine it being done.

POSTSCRIPT: HAROLD MEYERSON IN TOP FORM SAYS
YOU CAN'T MAKE A DEAL WITH THE SHRUNKEN GOP

"In its ideological uniformity, today's GOP looks -- O, the irony -- more like a classic European party than an American one."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his WaPo column today,

"Lincoln's Prophecy for the GOP"

Is Thursday "Let's Let Loose the Lefties" Day at WaPo OpEd? My guy Harold Meyerson has a really terrific column on the geographically and ideologically shrunken GOP. He starts by noting Senate Finance Committee ranking Republican Chuck Grassley's unexpectedly frank admission that he won't support any health care proposal that doesn't "find a broad base of support within the Republican Party," and wonders:

Why, then, does Max Baucus, the committee's Democratic chairman, persist in the charade of bipartisan negotiations with Grassley? Does he -- does anybody -- really believe that a Republican Party so deeply invested in defeating President Obama's campaign for health-care reform is open to a scaled-down version that Obama can still claim as a victory?

Meyerson takes a hard look at the consequences for American governance:

Republican ideology has shrunk alongside its geography and demographics. Where once its view of the role of government ran the gamut from Rockefeller activism to Goldwater libertarianism, today the party largely adheres to the religiosity and the anti-statism of the white South. (In its ideological uniformity, today's GOP looks -- O, the irony -- more like a classic European party than an American one.)

In short, the Republican Party with which Democrats could make deals no longer exists. The GOP is too narrow; the gap between the parties, too wide. Our politics are not those of the mid-20th century, when bipartisanship was fairly common. If anything, they're more like those of the mid-19th century, before the Civil War, when North and South combined only to make a house divided against itself -- a conflict resolved not by compromise, but, as Lincoln predicted, by a nation then half-slave and half-free becoming "all one thing or all the other."

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Of course it's not funny that the guy who created Blackwater may be a murderer. It's just that, well, is anybody surprised?

Oh, this is just our Erik being sworn in to testify before some congressional committee or other back in 2007 about some alleged Blackwater depredation or other. Who can keep track? Oh Lord, a crusading Christian freedom fighter's work is never done -- at least as long as there are Muslims left to exterminate.

by Ken

We really need to figure out some sort of strategy for dealing with the flotsam and jetsam that continues to surface from the eight years of unbridled lunacy and criminality that were the Bush regime.

Now it's one of the regime's most prized sociopaths, the founder of Blackwater, the American "security" firm (this is what we call out terrorist organizations) into which the regimistas poured still-uncounted jillions of dollars to befoul the good name of our country all over the world with its high-caliber acts of marauding and mayhem. From what we knew about this Erik Prince bozo, a thug with delusions of Christian grandeur, it always seemed pretty clear that he belonged under lock and key. As with so many of the regime's stooges and cronies, the only real question was whether he should have been in a prison or a mental institution.

With Blackwater under investigation (surprise!), it's now being alleged by two people who worked for Prince Nutso that he "may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities." And this is supposed to be a surprise? When you've got a government run by sociopaths, hiring a mix of sociopaths and psychopaths -- and you know how badly they get on together -- and telling them there are no rules for people like us, what do you expect?

Okay, let's look at just a little of this.

The Nation

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

by JEREMY SCAHILL

August 4, 2009

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety. . . .

Now of course the report goes on and on and on, you bet, and we should care about the sordid details, like the allegations that Blackwater was smuggling guns into Iraq in dog-food bags. But really, is there anything useful to be learned for those of us who spent those eight years screaming that everyone who participated in the activities of the Bush regime should be subject to the death penalty -- preferably on an execute-now, ask-questions-later basis? And the fact is, the rest of the country didn't give a damn about the all-consuming campaign of degradataion, depredation, and extermination unleashed by the Bush regime against all its "enemies" while it was going on, and by the time the shock and shame became too overwhelming, they simply tuned out. Bush? George W. Bush? Sorry, name doesn't ring a bell. Oh wait, didn't there used to be a lesbian by that name?

It appears that the sins of the Bush Regime -- including all those committed by, in, around, and for the regime -- have a "sell by" pull date just like dairy products in the supermarket. Yuck, it's old news. It's expired. It smells bad. Just pour it down the drain. We-the-People officially Don't Give a Darn. We want tea parties!

Besides, if the regimistas were to be held to account for every last murder, why, there'd be no end of it! I say, just add this to Attorney General Eric Holder's Super-Fantastic List of Old Stuff to Maybe Someday Investigate, or Not. (The list could someday actually have value to the adminstration, as it becomes increasingly desperate to buttress its one incontestably admirable quality: that it's not the Bush regime.)

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Of course Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee needs to be removed from the bench, but he probably won't be, because Americans LIKE torture

Judge Jay "The Torture Guy" didn't get where he is today by being either decent or honorable, any more than Sunshine Desserts baron C.J. (the ineffable John Barron) did. Here Reggie Perrin (the great Leonard Rossiter), well on his way to a nervous breakdown, sets out to demand a holiday from his boss. Instead, C.J. offers an afternoon off, from which he assures Reggie he'll "return a different man." "That's what Mrs. C.J. and I do," he says, "and we return different men."

by Ken

I may have been unfair to Pat Leahy. I noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman on Tuesday said to reporters, about Judge Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee (as Ryan Grim reported on Huffpost):

The decent and honorable thing for him to do would be to resign. And if he is a decent and honorable person, he will resign.

As much as I admire Senator Pat, so often he talks the talk, the good talk, the exactly right talk, but then somehow vaporizes when it comes to fighting the fight. And so my first thought was: Oh Pat, you dreamer! In this lost world of decency and honor with which you're apparently in telepathic contact, of course Judge Jay would resign. However, we live in the real world, where the Jayman knows that he didn't get on the bench by doing anything that could be called by the most charitable stretch either decent or honorable, and so why on earth would he be tempted to commit a decent or honorable act that would get him off the bench?

And all I could think of was C.J., Reggie's old boss at Sunshine Desserts in the immortal Britcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Why, if anyone had had the temerity to mention decency or honor in C.J.'s hearing, you just know he would have responded, "I didn't get where I am today by being decent or honorable."

In fairness to Senator Leahy, though, it turns out that he wasn't being quite so spontaneously dreamy in making his appeal to Judge Jay's decency and honor. He was in fact responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch's Monday rejection of the idea of impeachment, declaring that Jay the Torture Guy is "one of the most honorable people you'll ever meet."

Say what? One of the most honorable people I'll ever meet???

Um, no, Senator Hatch. It may well be that "Honk If You Love Torture" Jay is one of the most honorable people you've ever met. I've watched your all-too-public career for a long time now, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the sleazily opportunistic Torture Guy is a class act by the standard of the peeps you hang with. But that's not much of a standard.

What we are learning about Judge Jay's record heading the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- and by this I mean his willingness, or rather eagerness, to give the war criminals and Constitution-shredders of the Bush regime whatever legal cover they craved on torture or anything else -- is about as far from "honorable" as you can get. The word that pops to mind is nauseating.

IRONIC SIDEBAR: SPEAKING OF THE OLC

Along with defenses of the absolutely indefensible Jay the Torture Guy, what we're hearing from the Loony Right now is continued character assassination of President Obama's nominee to head the incredibly important OLC, whose charter is to provide the administration with the most accurate and authoritative legal opinions obtainable by the best legal minds, in other words the exact opposite of what the Bush regime sought, and got, from the fraudulent, craven, ideological-hack, butt-licking-careerist shysters it stocked the OLC with.

By all accounts (from non-insane people, that is), Obama designee Dawn Johnsen really is one of the most honorable people you'll ever meet, and she possesses one of the finest legal minds. (And by this I don't mean the kind of "fine legal mind" we've always been told Supreme Court Justice Nino Scalia possesses, which -- as anybody who reads his whacked-out opinions knows -- is in fact a cesspool of ultra-right-wing bigotry and prejudices underlying a borderline, if not across-the-border, sociopathic contempt for anyone who isn't rich and powerful.) And yet the Right, as currently personified by one of the truly nuttiest and vilest hacks to befoul the Senate, the loathsome James Inhofe, and scum-sucking Iowa Rep. Steve King, without acknowledging the role played by the Bush regimista OLC in laying waste to the Constitution and overturning our system of laws, continues to vilify Johnsen.

But I digress. Should Judge Jay be gotten the hell off the bench? Of course! And as more behind-the-scenes muck from the slime-filled Bush DoJ oozes out, there's certainly a chance that the scumbag will reach his humiliation threshold and slither off behind whatever rock he originally emerged from.

My only reservation about the impeachment process as applied to Judge Jay is that we're talking now about something the judge did before he was put on the bench. That's all supposed to be handled in his confirmation hearings. Can it qualify now as "an impeachable offense"?

Senator Leahy may have answered this question, even though he wasn't addressing it directly, when he said in the same chinwag with reporters Tuesday:

The fact is, the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee did not tell the truth. If the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee had told the truth, he never would have been confirmed.

The guy can hardly earn a free pass for having concealed this crucial information. Former Nazi concentration-camp guards who failed to disclose this activity when they applied for entry to the U.S. were nevertheless subject to deportation.

The case against Judge Jay is already pretty damning, and I suspect it's only going to get worse. Nevertheless, I think there's a good chance he's going to beat the rap. Why? Because, as a wise listserv colleague reminded us the other day, the American public by and large isn't at all offended by the idea of torture, and in fact to a large degree thinks it's a fine idea for when we need life-saving information immediately from bad guys. They don't know how heavily the odds are stacked against torture yielding any information of value.

We are talking, yes, about the 24 model, the 24 mentality, and the 24 audience. Don't get me started on that! But when people of the supposed intelligence of "Holy Joe" Lieberman subscribe to this wacko crock (and you owe it to yourself to read David Neiwert's Tuesday Crooks and Liars post "Holy Joe still loves him some torture"), is it surprising that people who watch that unmitigated pile of crap -- the dumbest scripts in TV history backed up by the worst acting and direction (Reginald Perrin is not only way funnier but way more realistic, a veritable slice of life by comparison) -- have not the slightest sympathy when we lefties froth about torture?

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Just as a potential case for legal misconduct in the Bush DoJ bubbles to the surface, ex-regimistas whine, "But you can't investigate the regimistas!"

In this segment from last night's Rachel Maddow Show, Michael Isikoff tells Rachel: "About a year ago, the head of something called the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is the Justice Department's ethics watchdog unit, disclosed to Congress that it had been investigating whether or not the authorship of [the 2002-3 torture] memos met the legal standards, professional standards, of Justice Department lawyers. This has enormous consequences."

"One of Bush and Cheney's most audacious capers, as far as I'm concerned, was deciding that they could get away with doing illegal stuff by simply having administration lawyers say that illegal stuff wasn't illegal anymore."

-- Rachel Maddow, introducing the above segment

by Ken

The OPR report, Isikoff went on to say, was essentially complete by the end of last year but met with serious objections from then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip. ("It could not be learned precisely what the grounds of Mukasey's objections were," he writes in his Newsweek report, adding that "neither he, Filip nor Mukasey's former chief of staff responded to requests for comment.) The report hasn't been presented yet to new AG Eric Holder, but assuming it is, Isikoff says in the clip,

We understand that if the report goes forward as it was presented to Mukasey, it recommends that the report be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action against the lawyers, which would be a huge embarrassment, obviously. It finds that the entire legal edifice of Bush counter-terrorism policy was based on, not just shoddy legal analysis, but unprofessional and potentially unethical legal analysis.

"The lawyers" are three former senior members of the crucial Office of Legal Counsel: our old friend John "Mr. Torture" Yoo, former Assistant AG and OLC head Jay Bybee (now a federal judge), and later OLC head Steven Bradbury. And according to Isikoff, the report goes into great detail as to how the memos were written, the suggestion being that they resulted from back-and-forth with the White House in which the Bush regimes wishes were drafted into legal opinion.

You have to wonder whether David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey (identified as "Washington lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush"), authors of a preposterous op-ed in today's Washington Post called "A Truth Commission? The Danger in Democrats' Rush to Investigate," knew when they pitched their piece that Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (now also MSNBC's Michael Isikoff, as we learn in the above segment) was about to blow the lid on this particular scandal.

What Rivkin and Casey are peddling is the seemingly commonsensical notion that policy differences, no matter how extreme, are no reason to go hunting for crimes in the activities of a previous administration. The answer to this is so obvious -- if you really don't know the difference between making and implementing policy and breaking the law, you really shouldn't talk publicly about either -- that they have to buttress their argument with a bunch of shaky constitutional arguments as to why a "truth commission" would be either jurisdictionally hamstrung or outright illegal. It's at awkward moments like this that right-wingers suddenly become connoisseurs of the fine points of constitutional separation of powers.

Of course this is all bullshit too. Not that some of the stated separation-of-powers concerns might not be real. But those are things you work out in the structuring of such a commission, assuming that such a commission is even the way to go. Maybe we should just convene bunch of grand juries to sort out which portions of the Bush regime's eight-year-long crime wave are prosecutable?

Come on! Rivkin and Casey don't give a hoot about constitutional niceties. They didn't start by asking, gee, I wonder if a "truth commission" is constitutionally permissible. They went looking for every angle from which they could claim it isn't. It is, in other words, the modus operandi of any defense attorney, whose concern isn't whether the client is guilty but what lines of argument and legal niceties and loopholes can be marshaled to derail the prosecution's case.

Rivkin and Casey want us to think that, ho-hum, this is what always want to do in politics: seek revenge on the other guys who used to be in power. But no, we mustn't allow that. Why, it would undermine the whole system of American government!

Except that, as they surely know, that's not what's happening at all. The problem is that the Bush-Cheney regime actually set out to undermine the whole system of American government. We know they succeeded to a terrifying an extent. Just how great an extent is one of the things we need to learn, for the most obvious practical reasons:

* If we don't know what happened, how can we fix it?

* And if we don't make the malefactors answer for their criminal behavior, how can we possibly hope to prevent it from happening again?

There is one obvious reason why the criminal-investigation problem is so severe after eight years of the Bush regime: the fundamentally criminal mindset of the masterminds of the Bush-Cheney regime. They seem to have gone beyond disregarding the law. In every area of policy making and implementation, they went out of their way to break every law they humanly could, in apparent adherence to the Nixon Doctrine that if the president does it, it's not illegal. For former Vice President Cheney in particular it seems to have been a matter of principle to flaunt the law-flouting, as necessary to him for life as breathing.

A related but perhaps less obvious reason why the situation now is so different is that throughout the executive branch the Bush regimistas did such a bang-up job of demolishing the built-in mechanisms for governmental self-policing, notably the network of inspectors general supposedly keeping tabs on every agency of the federal government. It's an inherently dicey business, trusting an organization to police itself. The president appoints the IGs, after all. That's already one strike against their "independence." Beyond that, an administration determined to keep control of the IGs and other investigators probably can develop a smorgasbord of ways of stifling them, and in the extreme case that you're left with some self-destructive nutjob who doesn't understand that the fix is in, well, there are lots of ways of making sure their reports never see the light of day.

One of the things we need to know is who did what to subvert the executive-branch watchdog institutions, again in order to repair them and try to protect them from future interference.

Let Rivkin and Casey conclude their sinister babbling in rhetorical high gear, complete with veiled threats:

Attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad, however much one disagrees with their policy choices while in office, is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery. As the history of the late, unlamented independent counsel statute taught, once a Pandora's box is opened, its contents can wreak havoc equally across the political and party spectrum. If, for example, al-Qaeda is nothing more than a criminal conspiracy -- as some have claimed for many years -- President Obama's charge sheet has already been started. By authorizing continued Predator missile attacks against al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has directly targeted those "civilians" with deadly force. That is a war crime.

Obama and the Democratic Congress are entitled to revise and reject any or all of the Bush administration's policies. But no one is entitled to hound political opponents with criminal prosecution, whether directly or through the device of a commission, and those who support such efforts now may someday regret the precedent it sets. Claims that the Bush administration abused presidential powers have been thoroughly reviewed by several congressional committees, and the Justice Department is capable of considering whether any criminal charges are appropriate. If H.R. 104 or a similar bill is passed by Congress, Obama should nip in the bud this recipe for a continuing political vendetta and veto the legislation.

Can two "Washington lawyers" really be this obtuse? For one thing, as Jonathan Turley has been screaming for months now with both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, when it comes to the war crime of torture, we don't even have a choice of whether to prosecute. We are required to by a host of international treaties.

But with regard to the full range of criminal behavior we already know was committed by the Bush regimistas, like the blatant politicization of the DoJ and numerous other government agencies, what Rivkin and Casey are saying is, we don't care what crimes were committed. Do most Americans really feel that way?

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Yet another court asks the Bush regimistas: What the hell kind of drugs are you people on? PLUS: Obama team forces political hack out at the CDC

Don Chimpy and Bush regime consigliere Big Dick swear they won't tell no stinkin' lies 'lessin' they feel like it, and if we don't like it, we can sue!

by Ken

You have to love those "law 'n' order" types who, given a badge, go on what looks to all outward appearances like a drunken binge to see how many laws they can break before somebody carts them off to either the pokey or the loony bin.

Here in NYC we had it with the Divine Rudy. He made his name, you'll recall, as the battling federal prosecutor who cleaned up Dodge. Not included in the legend is the epilogue: It seems as if just about everybody who appealed a Rudy-won conviction got it reversed. The general appeals court response to Rudy's prosecutions seems to have been: "Oh jeez, you gotta be kidding."

So the people of NYC elected the Divine Rudy mayor, and he went on a crime spree that would have made Al Capone envious. With that scarifying sneer on his puss which still sends shivers down my spine, he not only broke but spat on every law that either offended his sense of righteousness or interfered with his megalomaniacally self-appointed messianic mission. His attitude was: "Chuck you, Farley. If you don't like it, why dontcha sue? Huh? HuH?"

And in astonishing numbers, they did. The city must have had an entire cadre of lawyers at work defending those lawsuits. And as if that wasn't expensive enough for NYC taxpayers, here too the judges and juries sitting on those cases seem to have wondered what kind of drugs the Divine Rudy was on, and kept awarding plaintiffs juicy cash prizes.

This seems to be the legal model for the Bush regime's approach to (sneer, sneer!) "the law." This and, of course, the famous Nixon doctrine that "if the president does it, it's legal." (Really scary thought: Can you imagine what the Sainted Rudy could do with this kind of "get out of jail free" card? The mind boggles.) It's kind of a stretch to imagine that Chimpy the Prez ever gave deep thought to this subject -- or any other. Does anyone believe, for example, that our Chimpy came up with the idea for all those extra-constitutional "signing statements" on his own? This is a man who's barely up to the concept of signing his name.

But "Big Dick" Cheney, now that's another story -- a story I'm going to assume DWT readers are only too familiar with. Which brings us to the latest installment of Bush Regime Law 'n' Disorder, which a listserv colleague passed along with the note: "I haven't seen much buzz on this, so here ya go, from the Friday news dump."

Judge hands loss to White House on visitors logs

By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday rejected the Bush administration's latest attempt to keep secret the identities of White House visitors and declared that it engaged in illegal record-keeping practices.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth concluded that the practices in dispute took place before October 2004 when the Secret Service transferred large numbers of entry and exit logs to the White House and then deleted internal Secret Service copies of them.

The practices ended, the judge said, after various private organizations went to court in an effort to gain access to the logs.

Lamberth's ruling brushed aside the government's argument that revealing Secret Service logs would impede the president's ability to perform his constitutional duties.

The court said that the likelihood of harm is not great enough to justify curtailing the public disclosure goals of the Freedom of Information Act.

A watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked for the records to determine whether nine conservative religious leaders visited the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's residence in October 2006.

Lamberth's decision means the government will have to find other legal grounds if it wants to block release of the Secret Service logs.

While the case was a setback for the Bush White House, the effect of the administration's claim of a presidential communications privilege succeeded in dragging out the lawsuit filed in October 2006.

[Etc. etc. etc. At this point, can't we all write this story ourselves?]

In other words, now that the gang has vamoosed with the loot, maybe we can find out for a fact that it was indeed the energy barons who helped Big Dick formulate his "energy policy," under which those barons proceeded to pile up profits the like of which no one in human history had ever dared even to imagine? Got it -- just checking.


POSTSCRIPT: IN SOME WAYS, AT LEAST, THE LONG NATIONAL
NIGHTMARE IS OVER -- CDC POLITICAL HACK IS MOVED OUT

How many departments, agencies, and offices under control of the White House has the Bush regime perverted in the interest of extremist ideology -- and often in the financial interest of greedy Republicronies? Maybe it would be easier if we put it the other way: Is there any federal department, agency, or office that the regime didn't politicize?

It seems a lot of people concerned with public health, including the survivors of the wreckage at the Centers for Disease Control, are breathing loud sighs of relief if not actually breaking out the champagne at the news that the six-year tenure of Dr. Julie Gerberding (described by the colleague who passed this story on as "a one-person public health wrecking ball") is drawing to a close, as reported yesterday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It appears that, contrary to the assertion in the "brief written statement" provided by the CDC in response, Dr. Gerberding has been doing everything in her power to try to stay on, and a lot of people were afraid she might succeed.

CDC director Gerberding resigns at Obama's request

By ALISON YOUNG

CDC Director Julie Gerberding's controversial tenure will end Jan. 20 — after Barack Obama is sworn in as president, employees of the Atlanta-based agency were informed in an email sent late Friday evening. . . .

"As part of the transition process, the Administration requested resignation letters from a number of senior-level officials, including Dr. Julie Gerberding. This week, the Administration accepted Dr. Gerberding's resignation, effective January 20. As Dr. Gerberding noted in a November e-mail to CDC leadership, she has always expected that she would be leaving after the administration changes," [a "brief written statement" from the agency] said. . . .

Gerberding's six years leading one of the nation's most trusted institutions were marked by numerous controversies, from allegations that she allowed politics to interfere with science to concerns that her strategic decisions incapacitated the agency's ability to respond in a public health crisis. . . .

[F]or much of her tenure, many CDC employees lacked confidence in her vision for the agency. Just 48 percent of CDC staff said they had a high level of respect for the agency's senior leaders, according to results released last year of a federal survey of government employees.

Last year, congressional investigators concluded the CDC failed "in almost every respect" to protect Hurricane Katrina's victims from dangerous formaldehyde fumes in government-provided trailers. And Gerberding was accused of playing politics by refusing to reappoint the director of the agency's worker safety division -- a man widely respected by business leaders, labor unions and lawmakers.

Gerberding drew fire from Democratic lawmakers in 2007 when she delivered testimony to Congress about the health effects of climate change that had been censored by the White House.

In 2003 Gerberding launched a massive reorganization of the CDC that many employees say plunged the nation's 9-1-1 system for public health into turmoil and caused an exodus of key scientific staff.

In December 2005 five former CDC directors sent Gerberding a highly unusual joint letter warning that the agency was in trouble in the wake of her reorganization. They were alarmed by the departures of critical staff.

Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, who preceded Gerberding as CDC director and was one of the authors of the letter, served on the Obama transition team for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is the parent agency of the CDC.

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