Broken...Busted...And Beat To Hell

Years From Now, Historians Will Look Back At This Administration...And Consider Burning All Records Of Its Existence.

The Alberto Gonzales skid-mark of a tenure as Attorney General has been pretty well-covered by folks all around the reality-based end of the blogosphere. In fact, it's been what's driving the pursuit of this sordid bunch of stories—far better than the so-called digging on the part of print and broadcast journalists still "locked on lazy".

We even covered it at "Ye Olde News Blog” when this exploding cigar of a scandal first blew up in Bush's and 'Berto's faces a few months back—and had this to say about it:

"Simple question--right here and now. Why would an administration, its Attorney General, and involved partisan elected officials repeatedly lie about their involvement in something that they claim to be LEGAL AND ABOVE BOARD?

People lie for one of two reasons.

1.) To cover up a misdeed--an illegal or unethical act.

or,

2.) Because they are compulsive untruth-tellers who prevaricate about pretty much everything for little or no reason.

Neither of these reasons serves this administration well. The latter one indicates that they can be trusted on nothing, and the former one--the supremely prevalent one in general practice indicates serious, and damning illegality. They lied. Before Congress. Under oath. About circumventing the Constitution of the United States. Slaving the judicial branch--law enforcement, to the whims of the political needs of the executive branch. Somewhere in hell--probbly the boiler room, Pinochet, Marcos and Nixon are all smiling sweaty, proud "attaboy" smiles at this justice-poisoning news."

(Editor's Note: I can't front...I don't generally fall in love with graphics I come up with, but I LOVED lookin' at that one again! "Chortle!")

Which seems all the more apt now, as 'Berto's troubles' secondary prong—his differing statements about his involvement in the administration's wireless wiretapping scandal have come a' cropper.

"Come a' cropper" is nice folk-speak for, "caught lying his fucking ass off under oath." Jaws dropped all over the place, over his damning-as-all-hell "testimony" before Congress last week.

'In explaining why he and then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card made a dramatic visit to the hospital bedside of a seriously ill Attorney General John Ashcroft, Gonzales points to a key meeting earlier that same day, March 10, 2004.

At that meeting, according to Gonzales, the bipartisan group of congressional leaders known as the Gang of Eight, which oversees the most sensitive aspects of the intelligence community, demanded that a top secret surveillance program (widely believed to be the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program) be continued despite the refusal of the Department of Justice to sign off on the legality of the program.

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But tonight Democratic leaders who were at that meeting dispute Gonzales' version of events. Spencer Ackerman is reporting that Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi at the time the Democratic minority leaders in the Senate and House respectively, dispute Gonzales' account. The Washington Post is likewise reporting that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, strongly takes issue with Gonzales' version of events.
Why would an embattled attorney general whose credibility is in tatters spin a version of events that others are in a position to debunk?'

That's a rhetorical "why" that TPM asks. They later give pretty much the skinny on it, brandishing the word that D.C. folks would sooner eat brine-soaked glass than let pass their lips.

Liar.

Ooooooh! Clutch the pearls, bitches—I do believe we feel a bout of them ol' vapors comin' on!

We already know he's been lying like a DUI-busted Lindsay Lohan about his level of involvement in the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, but he's been able to hide behind the skirts, odd bangs, squeaky voices and jowls of underlings he's sacrificed in his stead. This nightmare, over the outright lying about the NSA scandal, goes even further—deeper actually, as it goes to the ash-heaping of one of the most fundamental rights we as Americans hold dear. The right to privacy. A laughably ironic one when you consider the AG's boss's claiming of the ultimate privacy right—"Executive Privilege" in the other prong of DOJ scandal, no?

He sat there, Gonzales did—and said that his creepy hospital visit to a Percoset cloud-dancing Ashcroft was about one thing—an alternate domestic spying program that we're not privy to, and claimed a shit-load of other people were briefed about it. Only to have those people ALL deny it, citing a different briefing date and topic of discussion—namely the one he initially denied under oath. The 'nad-kick was when FBI Chief Robert Mueller also contradicted "Seedy Gonzales" testimony—directly. Proven again, this time as a naked, stupid, bald-faced liar.

D.C.'s full of liars though. Sub shops, grimy Lotto joints, and liars—D.C. in a rat-nibbled nutshell. But it seems that all the other liars in town are so much better at lying than 'Berto is. Slicker...more accomplished at least. Halfway able to get close to "putting it over". Gonzales is that rarest of things in Beltway ciecles—a bad liar. A horrific one, at that. Incompetence and toadyism be damned; those are sadly, part and parcel of the Washington insider's game—but to be the sort of prevaricator whose words can be utterly disproven before the end of a news day, to where they are outright criminal? Well...that Ladies and Gentlemen, is a singularly destructive talent—or lack thereof.

But what makes 'Berto's folly soooooooo awful is it's poisonous leaching into things beyond just him, the person. We have seen, in the last 35 years, the office of the Attorney General get twisted around in some bad ways. We have seen the people in the office be little more than near-criminal hatchet-men and trail coverers. We have seen them reviled and heard their names invoked as evil incarnate, when their backing of an act or bill has displeased an "activated" portion of the populace. But by God, in spite of the worst that a John Mitchell might have done, (and please note what he was convicted of and did 19 months in the clink over) or the wild, and outrageous slings and arrows that buffeted a Janet Reno, this Attorney General, Mr. Gonzales, will go down in history as without a doubt, the most ethically damaged AG in U.S. history. He embarrassed himself publicly with the kind of fumbling, shifty, and on-the-fly lying that would make even a Stephen Glass blush, while covering for Constitution-trashing, illegal wiretapping. He wrapped uninvolved others—others who with but a word could expose him—in a badly-woven net of lies and dodges to protect himself and an equally sullied President. He has clearly perjured himself, and obstructed justice via his wavering lies.

But once you add to that, the scandal of the fired U.S. Attorneys, where even more lies were piled, you get a full look at the grotesque, hall-length mural that is the total trashing of the Office of the Attorney General...and, the laying to waste of the Justice Department itself. Fox News this past weekend unbelievably could not get a GOP panelist to come on-air to defend Gonzales. Host Chris Wallace actually said:

"By the way, we invited White House officials and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend Attorney General Gonzales. We had no takers."

The office of the so-called highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land has been turned into a fucking joke. Janet Reno's going on SNL to break through a wall and dance a weird Frug with Will Ferrell left herself with several times more gravitas than Gonzales has today. Can one even cite scholarship in "the law" as something to hang a hat on for him? His lame inability to even parse words well to make a convincing argument when under fire, speaks far less-than-well for the possibility of hidden, great talent as a barrister. The mass resignations of high-ranking Justice Department deputies to shield him, and the awful "rotating of stock" in the department—filling every nook and available cranny with Christofascist toadies who care not for law, but rather, how to apply the law to further the goals of their faux-holy, retrograde, party-first bosses— has so damaged it, that it's a barely functioning arm of the federal government right now. Where the Justice Department was once a place where in spite of who ran it, you could reasonably count on many of the country's best and brightest legal minds finding a place there to flourish, and enforce the laws of the land in a fairly egalitarian manner, we now find it converted mostly into a farm of partisan pods. Pods planted like mad by this administration, that sprout the likes of the Bradley Schlozmans, Monica Goodlings and Rachel Pauloses we now find ourselves bedeviled with in this short six years or so.

That's right...it's The Invasion Of The Justice Snatchers. —which would explain that disturbing, reedy whine of Schlozman's quite frankly.

The Attorney General's office and Justice Department have been rendered un-inhabitable right now. Pretty much unusable, in fact. That is the legacy of Alberto Gonzales. Something John Mitchell and his poisonous hyper-partisanship, and Janet Reno and her gaffes and targeting for hatred by her enemies could never do.

They never managed to wreck the office of the AG—nor did they come close to the crippling of the DOJ itself. Gonzales has...and then some. And it's going to take an awfully long time to restore integrity to the office, regardless of who the next person is (in the next administration, that is—if he were forced out now, which could happen, his immediate replacement would be little more than a seat-warmer) to take the job. It's going to take even longer to fumigate the DOJ itself. The equivalent of scores of "roach bombs" one would think, to de-infest what's presently in there...eating at the walls, and fouling the conducting of business—which is the enforcement of U.S. law—not the creepy Judge Roy Moore school of pick-n'-choose, moralistic bashing.

It's gonna take years to fix. And we can only hope that whoever the President is going to be, has enough stones, and patience—as well as the vision to pick the right person to repair it.

This... smashing of Justice.

Did you ever—EVER, think that you'd look back on John Ashcroft's hoary singing, backward ways, and yes...freaky aversion to breastage on federal statuary with a sense of laughing nostalgia?

Thanks for that, 'Berto. Seriously. Ha. Ha.

There's more...

“Hey Dubya! Nixon Called! He Says You're A Crook!”

“You know, just when I think you're the shallowest man I know, you somehow manage to drain a little bit more out of the pool.”—Seinfeld, Episode #59, “The Implant”

As bad as things are right now—with the willful debacle that is Iraq, with the warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, and the general perversion of the Justice Department—beyond all of that subterranean, Nixon-on-steroids level evil, if you can believe it, a new nadir has been reached by the Bush administration in the last week.

Seriously. We know that we've surpassed Watergate's levels of chicanery a long time ago. What took place this past week involving the cover-up of the cover-up of Army Corporal Pat Tillman's "friendly fire" death, via the citing of "Executive Privilege”, goes miles past being merely impeachment-worthy.

It's worthy of any evil—any imaginable evil you can wish upon its perpetrators. Get out your garlic and Holy Water:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The White House has refused to give Congress documents about the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman, with White House counsel Fred Fielding saying that certain papers relating to discussion of the friendly-fire shooting "implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests."

Get your wooden stake too:

“Two influential lawmakers investigating how and when the Bush administration learned the circumstances of Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death and how those details were disclosed accused the White House and Pentagon on Friday of withholding key documents and renewed their demand for the material.

The White House and Defense Department have turned over nearly 10,000 pages of papers mostly press clippings but the White House cited "executive branch confidentiality interests" in refusing to provide other documents.”

_________________________________________________

“Although Pentagon investigators determined quickly that he was killed by his own troops, five weeks passed before the circumstances of his death were made public. During that time, the Army claimed he was killed by enemy fire.
Tillman's family and others have said they believe the erroneous information peddled by the Pentagon was part of a deliberate cover-up that may have reached all the way to President Bush and then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. The committee said Friday it had scheduled a second hearing on Tillman's death for Aug. 1, this time to probe what senior Pentagon officials knew and when.”

And pray that someone can use whatever weapons they have at their disposal to defeat the beasts:

On Friday, July 13, Chairman Waxman and Ranking Minority Member Tom Davis sent letters to the White House and the Department of Defense objecting to the withholding of documents related to the death of Corporal Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004. Chairman Waxman also wrote the Republican National Committee to request communications about Corporal Tillman’s death by White House officials using e-mail accounts controlled by the RNC.

• The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld
Former Secretary of Defense
• Gen. Richard B. Myers (Retired)
Former Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Gen. John P. Abizaid (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Central Command
• Gen. Bryan Douglas Brown (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command
• Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger, Jr. (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command
• Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal
Commander, Joint Special Operations Command

Because that's what we're dealing with here—beasts.

When I think of Watergate, and I do quite often with the myriad scandals this administration is mired in this Summer, I remember how evil, and republic-threatening it seemed at the time. There was a break-in at opposition headquarters, an illegal campaign slush-fund, and a failed attempt to subvert the Justice Department.

It all seems so very small when you look at what's going on now. Leaking CIA agents, a patently illegal war, successful subverting of the Justice Department, and so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo.

This situation with the declaring of “Executive Privilege” in the Pat Tillman incident, though....if you really look at it, trumps almost anything in Watergate's sordid mudpile of misdeeds.

Tillman was killed in Afghanistan is the Spring of '04 after having walked away from his lucrative NFL career and contract to sign up with the Army to fight in the single sane prong of the so-called "War on Terror”. He was killed in a "friendly fire" incident while on patrol, and that fact was known to his superiors almost immediately, but for five weeks the military and the government spun his death as coming at the hands of faceless Taliban attackers—ostensibly to put a good gloss on the unfortunate mishap, and rather obviously, to rally folks 'round the flag via the lionizing of a "tragic" hero.

His uniform was burned and his body armor was destroyed almost immediately after his death to cover up the nature of how he died. Military superiors ordered witnesses to lie about how Tillman died, under threat of official punishment. But eventually, it got out those many weeks later about just what happened in that deadly mountain pass—as did the tale of the low-level portion of the cover-up.

It's the high-level—no, let me get it right.—highest, pinnacle, desperately hidden levels of the cover -up that has brought this administration down to common decency levels that would damn near make a Manson blush. It is APPARENT...BRUTALLY APPARENT that the order to turn Tillman's death into a P.R. football (pun not intended) came from the very highest levels of the government. The order to lie to the family, lie to the country and world, and even create a "manufactured narrative" came...from the very top echelons of U.S. government. And we know this because White House Counsel Fred Fielding has cited "Executive Privilege" as the reason for blocking the release of information pertaining to the government's immediate handling of Cpl. Tillman's death.

Ask yourself WHY? Why would they stonewall the release of those documents?

What could there possibly be to cover up?

We know lies were told. One could almost understand the need to manage the P.R. on the death delicately. Some massaging of the facts can almost be excused to put a better face on the then nascent war effort. But this wasn't just "massaging". It was a whole-cloth, made-up, LIE. What was the need for that? And since we know what actually happened, and already know the fact that lies were told—what else could there possibly be to cover up?

Here's what: The exposure OF THE FACT that for all the mealy-mouthed, wet-eyed platitudes about support for American troops, this government—IN THE HIGHEST ECHELONS OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH DO NOT GIVE SO MUCH AS A RAT'S ASS ABOUT IT'S FIGHTING FORCES. PLAIN AND SIMPLE.

The troops are literally pawns in Bush's hands. Chips to gamble. Non-entities. And this government not only considers them to be such, but evidently discusses them as such in privileged communications.

Living, breathing people. With families, who if you're not going to give them the unvarnished, soul-wounding truth, deserve at the least, common, human respect. And these documents that this government will not release, I'm sure detail the callousness and craven levels of manipulation used to further the administration's goals. They don't want it to get out that they are willing to absolutely wipe their asses with those of us who make the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. Because once that depth of their utter unfeeling and cheap skullduggery becomes fully known, there is no reason for anyone to believe a single word they'd say on anything.

Nothing on Nixon's tapes is as ugly as that. For all his personal hatred, and recorded dirty-tricks-ism, and paranoia, there is nothing in those tapes or "expletive deleted" documents that is as raw a "fuck you" as what those Tillman documents would inadvertently expose. That they ("they" meaning the administration, safe in Washington D.C. with access to fallout bunkers and all manner perks you the citizens will NEVER have) will use, and manipulate, and lie about you (the public/non-connected populace) in any way they deem fit, so long as it aids in the implementation of whatever the plan/policy-of-the-day is.

It is so close to a “Manchurian Candidate” type of hierarchical structure that it would make the blood run cold of anyone who ever found out about it. Which is why they don't want anyone to find out about it.

It is in a word, criminal.

And people at the very least see their careers end over self-serving lying like this.

"YPSILANTI, Mich., July 16 — Six months after a female student was raped and killed in her dormitory room, Eastern Michigan University said today that it had fired three administrators, including its president, who are accused of covering up the fact that a crime had been committed.

The president, John A. Fallon III, was ousted exactly two years into his five-year contract with the university. The board of regents also dismissed the vice president for student affairs, James Vick, and the campus police chief, Cindy Hall, and reprimanded the general counsel, Kenneth McKanders.

The actions follow lengthy reports by the Department of Education and investigators at a local law firm that said school officials had violated federal law by not disclosing campus security information after waiting more than two months to tell other students that Laura Dickinson, 22, had been killed. The university had insisted that foul play was not suspected, even as the authorities investigated several suspects, and it revealed the true circumstances of Ms. Dickinson’s Dec. 12 death only after another student was arrested in February.

A high-profile death. A self-serving lie and cover/up. Utter disregard of the family and public. Putting spin and damage control ahead of truth and simple humanity. The same Goddamned ingredients—except in the Eastern Michigan case, the truth eventually came out. In the Tillman case, the government is actively blocking the truth's coming out. The revulsion people feel upon hearing about the University's evil ass-covering, should be equally imparted to the Bush administration for its EQUAL level of duplicity.

This is a big deal.

Contact your local Congressperson and tell that person that YOU WILL NOT TOLERATE the Administration's stonewalling the facts on this cover-up, NO MATTER HOW HIGH UP IT GOES.

Here's the House of Representatives switchboard number: 202-225-3121, and here's how to reach them by e-mail

And get on the Senate's ass as well. Here's their switchboard number: 202-224-3121, and e-mail contact info.

They are playing with the death of a U.S. Army soldier. They said "fuck you” to his family, and threatened anyone who told the truth with punishment. His life meant nothing to them—his demise was a P.R. element to be twisted, puffed full of air, and then floated before our eyes to distract and manipulate.

These are not regular people we're dealing with. They are devils. Beasts. Literal Death-Eaters .

And they make Nixon, bad as he was—look like a fucking piker.

Take. Them. Down.

There's more...