I’m not a cab driver who has a collection of copies of The Catcher In The Rye on a shelf in my apartment...but I smell a rat, decomposing slowly in one of the dank corners of Bush’s cabinet. Last week, I sent up this post about the failure of the FBI to use properly certain privileges of investigation afforded it by the USA Patriot Act. It’s old news now, but for-now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is still news, though for Something Completely Different.
The new flap - which isn’t exactly new, but continues to dominate the news cycle, unlike the Patriot Act bit - has to do with the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department. This article on MSNBC, from the Financial Times, notes that “in December seven prosecutors were told to resign for what the Justice Department insisted were performance reasons,” and that an “eighth was pushed out to make room for a protégé of Karl Rove, presidential adviser.” It also states that unnamed Democrats were contending that five of the eight attorneys who had been fired were working on some kind of “political corruption probe.”
Not that cronyism in the Bush administration is new or anything, but Bush is practically leaping at Congressional Democrats for having the temerity to threaten subpoenas during their investigation of his lackeys. This is the part that’s new - before order was restored to Congress in the midterm elections, Bush had gotten very used to doing whatever he wanted, with zero accountability, including lying about sending American citizens to die on foreign soil for no good reason.
Another article on MSNBC, from MSNBC news services, quotes Bush as saying that he “proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse.” And that “reasonable way” would be...uh...sending Karl Rove (the consigliere) and Harriet Miers (Sonny’s sister?) up to Capitol Hill for interviews - except that there will be no transcriptions of those interviews and those two lackeys will not be put under oath.
Remember last year when the oil company executives (that would be the heads of the five families, to continue with a Godfather analogy that is actually starting to get a little spooky with how dead-on it is) went up to the Hill to testify before the then-Republican-controlled Congress? They weren’t put under oath either, and the Dems objected. The Republican response? They said that there was no substantive difference between lying to Congress under oath and lying to Congress without having been put under oath, which greatly reassured all of us that the oil company executives would be completely honest and forthcoming about tens of billions of dollars of profits in their pockets while you and I shell (pun intended) out well over two bucks a gallon for gas.
Maybe I’m just bonkers...but it almost sounds like premeditated obstruction of justice; and someone has both spoken to Bush and spoken to Rove and Miers about it, so that adds conspiracy to obstruct justice to the list of charges. If Bush spoke directly to Rove and Miers, then he is just as guilty as they are of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Unfortunately, it would take those two lying to Congress while under oath in order to bring about thoe charges - and then someone would have to tie it back to Bush in order to drag him down, too.
I don’t think Bush’s “way” is all that “reasonable.” He calls it a “partisan fishing expedition” on the part of the Democrats, and I guess you can’t really blame him for that. What it’s actually called is “accountability,” but he’s gone a shade over six years without having to face any of that, so it’s not really a surprise that he doesn’t recognize it for what it really is. It’s the system of checks and balances finally checking this President’s power, which has gone unchecked since he assumed the throne - er, the Presidency.
One last article, from Newsweek, sums up the whole spectacle pretty nicely. Bush won’t have to fire Gonzales, just like he didn’t have to fire Donald Rumsfeld - even though he should have, and long before he did. The house of cards is starting to flutter in the breeze - and it won’t be long now, I don’t think, before the whole thing blows over and reveals that the little man behind the curtain is no wizard.
Not much of a conspiracy theory, I know - but try this! I said at the top that I smell a rat - and that rat is that this story is news at all. I mean, yeah, it’s news - but so was that story about the abuses of the Patriot Act by the FBI, and it went away like that! (The Blog-O-Rama snaps its fingers.) Literally. The day that story broke, it was at the top of the MSNBC page - but by the end of the day it was gone. You actually had to enter a search string to get a hit on that story. This article - the last one, I promise - is from today (well, Tuesday) and talks about the Congressional response to the report of the Justice Department’s Inspector General; but this story is still flying under the radar, compared with the story about the firing of the U.S. attorneys.
Then again, it might just be me. Hmm...there must be a copy of The Catcher In The Rye around here somewhere.
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