You have probably heard by now that Fredo Gonzales' date with dementia last week underwhelmed even the most wingnutty of the senators (like Tom Coburn) on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The only one who coddled him a little bit was Orrin Hatch, who has to play nice because his name is being considered as a replacement for Gonzales. His "I don't remember" count was something in the 70s or 80s. You can relive these golden moments with
this video.
But don't worry!
Bush expressed his "confidence" in Abu G right after the hearings:
"The Attorney General went up and gave a very candid assessment, and answered every question he could possibly answer, honestly answer, in a way that increased my confidence in his ability to do the job. . . . And as the investigation, the hearings went forward, it was clear that the Attorney General broke no law, did no wrongdoing. And some senators didn't like his explanation, but he answered as honestly as he could. This is an honest, honorable man, in whom I have confidence."
Huh, how about that? Gonzales' testimony was so bad that I thought
Bill Frist might have to diagnose his brain activity, and yet Junior said it increased his confidence in him. How to explain this? Turns out it was a lie, as so much else that oozes from Bush's mouth. At a
press conference yesterday, Bush spokesmodel Dana Perino (lie to me, Dana!) admitted:
Q But did the President actually see the testimony?
MS. PERINO: He got regular updates from us while we were on the road -- we were on the road that day, on the way to Ohio.
Q So how can he say he has increased confidence if he got updates from other people? So he didn't actually see the testimony, himself, because --
MS. PERINO: He got updates from us, and I think he saw some news coverage of it later that day.
Q But as Jim noted, I mean, Arlen Specter yesterday said that it was "very, very damaging to his own credibility." So what did the President see -- well, he didn't see the testimony, but what did he hear that he --
MS. PERINO: What the President knows is that the Attorney General answered honestly, truthfully and was as responsive to Congress as he could possibly be during hours of testimony and in turning over all the documents, and then making people that work for him available to the Congress in order to answer their questions.
Amazingly, most people still don't know what this scandal is about. On last Friday night's
"Real Time" with Bill Maher, even non-Bushies Maher and Brian Schweitzer didn't have a clue as to why any of this matters. All they could come up with was that this is a scandal because Gonzales keeps lying about it, and that Gonzales is very stupid, so we should all be appalled. Let's nail down why these firings are so problematic.
First of all, you've probably heard all the right wingers get their panties in a bunch over the fact that "Bill Clinton fired all 93 prosecutors at once!!!!" Indeed, Clinton did ask for all of their resignations in March of 1993. And, by the end of his first two years in office, he had replaced 89 of the US attorneys. In non-contrast, Reagan had replaced 89 attorneys in his first two years, and G. W. Bush had replaced 88 of them in his first two years.
More here. So much for the "Clinton did it" smokescreen.
The problem with the firings hinges on three very bad things (VBTs):
- First was their frantic need to sack Carol Lam before she overturned the next rock in the Duke Cunningham scandal and discovered the grubby white form of Dick Cheney there.
- Second was the firing and defamation of Republican USAs who were not bringing bogus "voter fraud" prosecutions against Democrats in time to smear the Democrats and sway elections in crucial states.
- The third VBT is creating a Justice Department run like the mafia, where all of the remaining USAs (and the replacements) understand that if you do not bogusly prosecute Democrats or do prosecute Republicans, you will get shit canned - and that the public understands this, too. The third VBT is, in effect, letting Karl Rove be the de facto Attorney General, and decide who will be prosecuted and who will NOT be prosecuted, based on his very enlightened non-partisan view of the world.
Do the rest of the US attorneys enjoy the tacit assessment of the rest of the world, that they are all "loyal Bushies", and would place loyalty to Generalissimo Bush above the law? Either that, or that they were too radioactive to touch, like Patrick Fitzgerald.
A word about terms here: "Voter fraud" will henceforth mean the fear that some brown person somewhere is trying to vote twice (or really, even once). "Election fraud" means organizations like the government and national parties using their power to suppress the vote.
Studies of voter fraud have shown that it is an extremely rare phenomenon. There are usually about a dozen or so actual cases in a given federal election year, but many of these result from some voters not knowing exactly where their polling place is. Strangely, one of the actual cases of
true voter fraud involves Ann Coulter.
However, allegations of voter fraud are thick on the GOP ground. The Republican National Committee has built a massive legal organization solely for the purpose of combating the non-problem of voter fraud, which they have used to commit actual election fraud. The "Voter Integrity Project" is a front group for GOP lawyers, all of whom are committed to getting thousands of people thrown off voting rolls. Many of these lawyers have ended up (surprise, surprise) in the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division.
Unsurprisingly,
On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001 , the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.
Some of the results from this include:
In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million.
Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters.
Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor.
So you see, bogus "voter fraud" is just a smokescreen for hiding actual election fraud. And most of the fired US attorneys were not going along with it.
Digby has an
incredibly important post on "voter fraud" and a fellow with the comically villainous name Hans von Spakovsky, who is at the heart of this scandal.
Von Spakovsky worked for the Voter Integrity Project. The VIP is run by Helen Blackwell. Helen Blackwell is the wife of
Morton Blackwell, who at the last RNC convention in 2004 helped
GOP delegates mock a wounded American veteran by passing out little band-aids with purple hearts on them. Yes, the GOP couldn't believe that John Kerry could have gotten purple hearts in combat. No doubt they would have treated him differently if he had been put in a wheelchair from his wounds. (Whoops! I almost forgot about their treatment of
Max Cleland. My bad!).
Now for the final irony. A veteran from Killeen, Texas, where the GOP Kool-aid must run out of the tap, gave his Vietnam-era purple heart to George W. Bush last week, because of all the verbal attacks and emotional wounds and scars the President bears from his contentious presiduncy. I hope the gesture helped Bush get over his hurt widdle feelings.
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