Bush Is A Libby-ral!
Don Davis of Satirical Political has put up a timely and classic gem:
BUSH’S COMMUTATION OF LIBBY SENTENCE REALLY AN ‘iPARDON’
“WITH THIS LITTLE HAND-HELD GADGET, I NOT ONLY MARCH TO MY OWN TUNE, BUT FIND BANDS THAT CAN COVER MY ASS.”
Thanks to the compliant American corporofascist media, that ass is being covered quite nicely, thank you! Thus, it is left to Donna Marie Artuso, writing in the Winnipeg Sun, to expose the real reason why Libby was released from serving his time - to prevent embarrassing squeeling:
To the astonishment of no one, U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday commuted the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby following his conviction on four felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. All this righteous indignation [following the announcement] is not … likely to hurt Bush, whose public support has already fallen to historic lows.
But it is not particularly clever because it fails to address the critical question of why this president was moved to take such an unprecedented action. The justification he offered was that the prison sentence was too harsh. But Bush didn’t reduce the prison time — he eliminated it completely.
So if hotel heiress Paris Hilton
can serve 20 or so days behind bars,
why can’t Scooter Libby?[P]erhaps it is because Libby, when he lied to federal investigators about the leak, was protecting someone higher up than himself in the White House food chain - which is very high up indeed. And once in prison, he may have felt somewhat [less] loyal and less obliged to continue protecting them.
It’s not like the Democrats don’t still have means to use to attempt to crack the defenses of the Neoconfidence Men. P M Carpenter relates “a modern fable” to remind us that Conyers could wipe that smugness off Bush’s face:
John Conyers, the House Judiciary Committee’s chairman and irrepressible swordsman, announced earlier this week that he’ll hold a hearing on the presidential power of clemency, which, given the reigning scofflaw who possesses that power, means a hearing on its abuse.
Said Rep. Conyers’ statement:
“Taken to its extreme, the use of such authority could completely circumvent the law enforcement process and prevent credible efforts to investigate wrongdoing in the executive branch.”
Right-wing bloviation merchants and the mainstream media (if they’re not still obsessing over John Edwards’ haircuts) will, of course, snicker and ridicule. They’ll declare the debate settled before it begins.
[W]e’ve been down this interpretational road before — and that road ended with another House Judiciary chairman confronting conventional thinking, and arriving at a quite different and ultimately determinate conclusion:
Chairman Peter Rodino once snapped to dubious reporters, “To me, ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ were never precise. The way I read them, they aren’t meant to spell out anything but a president’s performance in office. I see it as the kind of conduct that brings the whole office into scandal and disrepute, the kind of abuse of power that subverts the system we live in, that brings about in and of itself a loss of confidence in this system.
“I guess, all in all,
it’s behavior which in its totality
is not good for the presidency,
nor any part of the system.”The [Nixon] White House, much of the press and, naturally, herds of contemporary [1974] right-wing bloviators initially tried laughing off that argument. A high crime or misdemeanor means a high crime or a misdemeanor — period — they snorted, in response to which Chairman Rodino’s committee then drafted a boatload of impeachment articles, which, as journalist Teddy White broadly characterized them shortly after, embodied the outrage that “Richard Nixon through his men and his administration had frustrated the operation of justice against wrongdoers and abused the power of state against a number of free citizens, and thus, against all citizens.”
Chairman Rodino’s committee also issued this general finding: “Unlike a criminal case, the cause for the removal of a President may be based on his entire course of conduct in office.”
Whereupon the White House,
the press and the bloviators
stopped laughing.
Such a brave assertion, Mr. Carpenter! But it misses a specific point of historical fact that is not currently in place to bring this political drama to a near-term close along similar lines: The Supreme Court of the Watergate days ruled against Nixon and for the rule of law.
Over at The Regressive Antidote, they remind us that today’s SCOTUS is very different:
After Gerry Ford proclaimed that “our long national nightmare is over”, he followed that famous lines with these words: “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” Methinks we may have yet another chance to test that proposition in the near future.
Americans love to believe that they are proud owners of the world’s greatest democracy. But the final arbiter of much policy making in the United States is the Supreme Court, not only the least democratic of the three branches of government, but in fact almost completely non-democratic at all.
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is just beginning. I say this because, just as the Bush administration and the regressive political movement of which it has been the most recent and most potent manifestation are recessing into a toxic pool of failure, incompetence, disaster and public abhorrence - purely of their own making - the politics they represent have now been all but firmly established on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.
The Supreme Court is arguably the most powerful lawmaking institution in American government - the be-all, end-all and final stop for any policy debate in which the country is engaged - and was therefore always the great prize for the cancer of regressive politics which has been metastasizing in America since Reagan, if not earlier. The presidency was always important to the right, and Congress too, especially the Senate. But the chief importance of these institutions was ultimately their capacity to serve as vehicles for remaking the third branch of government, by loading it up with young reactionaries serving lifetime terms, who would therefore sit on the bench making policy for a very, very long time. And who, by virtue of the Constitution’s design, would be all but untouchable by any influence, check or balance, likely including public opinion.
Between Reagan and the two Bushes - not to mention classic Clintonian centrism in judicial appointments - the entire federal judiciary is now heavily stacked with right-wingers pledged to maintain their destructive march to the sea, and all of them sitting in jobs with lifetime appointments. This was the movement’s great quest all along, and the decisions of the Supreme Court this year demonstrate the scope of their victory, with far more to come.
And so it was that the regressive movement got its great and long sought after prize - a Supreme Court so backward that many of its decisions would have looked retro even in the nineteenth century. If ever you needed an indicator of how far gone these cats are, the idea that John Roberts’ jurisprudence is insufficiently rabid to satisfy the mainstream of today’s conservative movement ought to send shivers up your spine.
A Supreme Court which matches George Bush every step of the way in terms of both its bad politics and its obstinance could find itself facing some serious public wrath, particularly after a belly-full of eight years of the same from Bush. We may well need to make our policy preferences strongly known to this “non-political” branch of government so immersed in politics, and so political in its decision making.
And who is this “we” that “needs” to restore our democratic principles? Why, it’s none other than WE, The PEOPLE!
But who will lead this populist uprising? Look! Off in the recent past! It’s a Byrd! It’s a Plame! It’s SuperMom!
Like Joan d’Arc rising to retake French lands from British occupation, Cindy Sheehan has returned to the movement to restore democracy to America:
If Congress won’t dig BushCo’s political grave, it is the People’s job to do so.
Thomas Jefferson said that we need a Revolution every 20 years, or so, to keep our Republic honest. Over 225 years have passed since our last Revolution (if you don’t count the War Between the States) and we are long overdue for one. It is about time us “peasants” (in the eyes of the Fascist Ruling Elite) march on DC with our “pitchforks” of righteous anger and our “torches” of truth to demand the ouster of BushCo.
Call out the Instigator
Because there’s something in the air
We got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here
You know it’s right!– Thunderclap Newman
It’s a good choice of tune, Cindy, but I’d like to propose another tune to celebrate the news. It’s an oldie but goodie from 1789 Paris, and it goes “Roll out the tumbrels…“