Bullshit & Obfuscation ~Gonzales Disses Congress
Alberto Gonzales, probably Demon Princess's least favorite member of Bushco, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, where he opined that Congress should just make the very tribunals that the Supreme Court struck down in Hamdan legal. So reports the New York Times (title bar).
He was equally smarmy when questioned about his own Department's lawyers being denied security classifications they needed to investigate ethics charges (against other lawyers who okayed the spying program (?).
Gonzales said that Bush himself personally had denied the clearances.
And that's that. End of investigation.
Has any Justice Department in the country's history been so securely tucked into the "unitary" executive's back pocket, & so clearly unconcerned about the fact that the nation's laws are being violated & citizens' civil rights flagrantly so?
He also attended to miscellaneous housekeeping matters such as grandstanding about the hateful & traitorous press that dares tell the public what the most secretive Administration ever somehow fails to tell us:
"Mr. Gonzales also criticized news organizations for revealing details about classified intelligence programs. 'It is wrong that someone would reveal intelligence activities that are helping to prevent another terrorist attack on America,' he said. 'American lives are potentially endangered by such conduct.'
Perhaps nothing sickens me more about this Adminstration than the fact that the country's chief legal officer in charge of upholding the nation's laws does no such thing, & having apparently sold his soul-- oversees the perversion of them instead.
posted by Demon Princess at 10:00 PM
5 Comments:
Princess, I'm starting to feel like a frog in the proverbial pot of water. When will we know when it's boiling?
Hearing the top cop say that bush can break any law he wants to, hits me like a root canal.
What does a coup look like anyway?
I've been thinking about that a long time, Paul. Why AREN'T alarmed people taking to the streets &/or is civil disobedience on a widespread scale (which I think will be next if these assholes don't tone it down & start behaving like we all still live in America).
For one, I think that, with so much scandal about corruption, secrecy & other untoward behavior emanating from GOP behinds lately, people have trouble keeping track of it all. It's just steady stream of background noise, par for the course. Plus, we've been a more-or-less settled & peaceful nation for 100 years, & we're just not ready to see it.
A friend of mine says that not until the "middle class" is pinched REALLY hard & feels some serious pain (as opposed to the slow draining that's been taking place so far) will the outrage get to the boiling point & some serious backlash occur.
And I keep thinking back to what Tyler Drumheller, CIA Chief in Europe, who finally got so disgusted with Bushco's dissembling & fixing of facts around policy in the run-up to Iraq that he went public with it. He remarked in an interview (back here in this blog somewhere), that people, even his own relatives, who should have fully appreciated his unique vantage point & insight, couldn't quite believe it. He said, "They just don't want to believe that a President of America would do this (lie) to them."
We as a nation, have grown complacent, & so take too much for granted: "it would never happen here", so have not been willing or able to see that it IS.
We (at least I) tended to see the neocon thing as a slight "correction," after which things would get back to normal, but that was an assumption predicated, I now realize, on a fairly transparent media doing its job, & a government that is not about the TOTALLY unAmerican Campaign of Super-Secrecy such that we're told (& locked out of any form of legal redress) what we WILL think about everything. It's becoming Orwellian in scale. Where democracy is concerned, we're swiftly losing ground, but a great number of of us are still in denial.
Not to mention the old political trick of "bread & circus," which the Romans 1st perfected--distract the populace with entertaining sideshows accompanied by lots of hubris & noise (& those sorts of distractions are plentiful in modern America, whether the consumeristic lifestyle or TOTALLY inane TV), feed them the most basic diet (bread) so their stomachs aren't rumbling, & meantime, go quietly about your agenda of seizing control & just doing what you want.
I think that what we've got going on here is the brewing of a "perfect storm" that we haven't seen since the gilded age of American politics, this time with a cynically engineered war & the technology to control our own population to a degree that's unprecedented. It do scare the shit out of me, & I've been quiet too long--hence, this blog.
And yadda yadda yadda, too ~ ! Hope you weren't just asking rhetorically!
Well, I was asking rhetorically, but isn't that usually the case when dealing with an individuals opinion? It looks like a coup to me but I am just a woodworker, what do I know eh?I had a feeling that you had more to say on the issue and your comments are very much appreciated. I'd like to hear your take on the recent congreessional decision barring federal judges from hearing cases on the pledge of allegiance. It seems as though we're moving to a point there will be no need for judges or attorneys.
I agree that he is also one of my most "hated" in the Shrub's cabal of cronies.
Ah yes, the axis of evil! Thoroughly & completely. Addington, Cheney's lawyer, is another who makes me ashamed of the breed.
Post a Comment
<< Home