Andrew Foster Altschul
It's the Constitution, stupid. You'll never get a better Christmas gift than the NSA wiretapping scandal. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to let this one slide into the murmurs of committee hearings and "Washington Week," or are you going to stand up and insist -- loudly, repeatedly, unswervingly -- that this is a country of laws, that the President has admitted on national television that he broke the law, that he intends to continue breaking the law "so long as
President," and that in order to preserve the rule of law, criminals must be punished? The public must be shown that this is a vitally important issue. If that means calling the Senate into closed session, if it means boycotting one-sided Congressional hearings, if it means shutting down the government with a party-wide walk-out, the Republicans must not be allowed to change the subject.
(snip)
- Stay on topic. Republicans will want the hearings to focus on the question of whether what the President did was legal. They want the matter to appear as a "judgment call," critics as willing to sacrifice national security for an uptight and overly complicated reading of a vague statute. But this is sophistry. There is a clear, unambiguous law, and the President did not obey it. That equals illegal, whatever his reasons. The President's assertion -- that he is qualified and entitled to assess the applicability of the law and to ignore it at will -- is the only relevant question. The question of legality has already been answered. It's not a question at all.
- It's the crime and the cover-up. Here's a question no one is asking: Since Bush knew a year ago that The New York Times would eventually run the wiretapping story, was Samuel Alito chosen for the Supreme Court specifically because he had previously defended this practice? Did Alito have any conversations with the President on this topic prior to the nomination? (A follow up: As White House Counsel, Harriet Miers is implicated in the NSA orders. Was her otherwise inexplicable Supreme Court nomination an attempt to get her "out of harm's way" before the story broke?)
- It is time to start calling things by their proper names. Here are some words to add to your vocabulary: Lying: As opposed to "misleading," "finessing," "not being straight with," etc. The President has lied to the country, to the Congress, to the media, to the world. Abuse of Power: In addition to drawing useful connections to Watergate in the minds of voters, this term has the virtue of being absolutely appropriate to the President's actions. Money Laundering: c.f. Tom DeLay. Bribery, is the only word that applies to those who took money from Jack Abramoff. Insider Trading and Blind Trust: If the latter is not truly blind, then it's the former, period. Blackmail: As in a Medicare official threatened with loss of job if he tells Congress the true price of the prescription drug plan, and Political Retaliation: As in what happened to General Shinseki and Valerie Plame. Criminal Negligence: As in Mike Brown, Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, et. so many al. As long as we insist on finding polite euphemisms for these things, the public will assume they are minor infractions, not serious matters.
(more)
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-foster-altschul/2006-the-dems-makeorb_b_13186.html>
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