Ever Breathtaking (and not in the good way)
Just when you thought the Bush Administration couldn't get sleazier, this delightful nugget.
Where this one becomes breathtaking in its appallingness is in its convergence of so many unthinkables. Well unthinkable if you have a Sept. 10 mindset, apparently. When you consider how many American Unthinkables are contained within this single story, all of it stemming from one amazingly terrible day.
It's fashionable to say we Canadians betray an irrational Anti-Americanism and like any lame stereotype, there's the grain of truth that comes from being a much smaller, much less-important country beside the world's only remaining superpower. That sort of knee-jerk reaction does exist here, but I'll let you in on a secret--deep down, despite all the resentment that's engendered to our bigger, richer, flashier neighbour Up Here, we always felt you were the good guys. America was the Statue of Liberty and Schoolhouse Rock animations of bills being passed into law. It was the other guys, the Soviets, who purged their own ranks of dissent, seized the levers of government by appointing 'loyalists' to positions of influence, detained people without charge, tortured them and locked them into gulags.
The Americans, on the other hand, had the Constitution, the Separation of Powers, a government of laws that may very well have been imperfect, but held out the possibility for citizen-initiated change.
How far we've come, America. How breathtakingly far. Let's recap:
1. An incoming Attorney General, the nation's top lawyer, basically fires a Justice Department lawyer for drafting a legal opinion declaring torture 'abhorrent'. Torture.
2. Because it's important to give a reach-around, the incoming AG offers the guy he's just canned a plum gig in Los Angeles, and
3. ... SNIP (from the ABC story)
...Just a few weeks before Levin was asked to leave, White House Advisor Karl Rove and Gonzales were involved in discussions over the dismissals of several U.S. attorneys. Nine were dismissed the following year, and the matter erupted into a scandal, with critics alleging the administration saw the US attorney posts as patronage positions. UNSNIP
Levin told the committee this happened in 'early 2005,' according to the story. For the record, Carol Lam, U.S. Attorney for Southern California was one of the seven U.S. Attorneys dismissed on Dec. 7, 2006.
So just to be clear on this, the nation's top lawyer canned one of his top legal minds because the administration didn't think he would 'come out the right way' on fundamental matters of basic justice like, whether its okay to torture. Habeas corpus. Warrantless wiretapping (ie: the right for citizens to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to privacy). At the same time, he was working with Karl Rove, perhaps the most amoral political operative ever (and that's saying a lot) to purge the US Attorney ranks and replace the purged with political loyalists and hacks. I doubt these turkeys would have gotten as far as they did, had it not been for 9/11.
It's bad enough they took advantage of their citizens' collective fear and trauma to so dramatically pervert the American body politic, but what really makes the blood boil is their cockiness. You can see the arrogance in Bush's smirk, in Gonzalez' last appearance before Congress. It's the arrogance of people convinced they have all their bases covered.
'We don't torture,' Bush famously said as the horrors of Abu Ghraib unfolded to the world. We now know better, of course, but because they shoved out the people who might have acted as a check on them and replaced them with Loyal Bushies, they managed to craft legal justifications for what they did, created euphemisms so they could say perhaps, in the narrowest legal parsing possible, it wasn't exactly torture.
From the people who promised to 'restore dignity to the White House' indeed. If anything, it's practically an identical twin to Bill Clinton's famous "It depends on what your definitition of 'is,' is" remark during the Lewinsky scandal, only with thousands more dead people and the most fundamental of human freedoms trampled.
America is more than just a country. It's an idea, an experiment. Who or more accurately what, has lost the most since The War on Terror began?
h/t: Andrew Sullivan
Where this one becomes breathtaking in its appallingness is in its convergence of so many unthinkables. Well unthinkable if you have a Sept. 10 mindset, apparently. When you consider how many American Unthinkables are contained within this single story, all of it stemming from one amazingly terrible day.
It's fashionable to say we Canadians betray an irrational Anti-Americanism and like any lame stereotype, there's the grain of truth that comes from being a much smaller, much less-important country beside the world's only remaining superpower. That sort of knee-jerk reaction does exist here, but I'll let you in on a secret--deep down, despite all the resentment that's engendered to our bigger, richer, flashier neighbour Up Here, we always felt you were the good guys. America was the Statue of Liberty and Schoolhouse Rock animations of bills being passed into law. It was the other guys, the Soviets, who purged their own ranks of dissent, seized the levers of government by appointing 'loyalists' to positions of influence, detained people without charge, tortured them and locked them into gulags.
The Americans, on the other hand, had the Constitution, the Separation of Powers, a government of laws that may very well have been imperfect, but held out the possibility for citizen-initiated change.
How far we've come, America. How breathtakingly far. Let's recap:
1. An incoming Attorney General, the nation's top lawyer, basically fires a Justice Department lawyer for drafting a legal opinion declaring torture 'abhorrent'. Torture.
2. Because it's important to give a reach-around, the incoming AG offers the guy he's just canned a plum gig in Los Angeles, and
3. ... SNIP (from the ABC story)
...Just a few weeks before Levin was asked to leave, White House Advisor Karl Rove and Gonzales were involved in discussions over the dismissals of several U.S. attorneys. Nine were dismissed the following year, and the matter erupted into a scandal, with critics alleging the administration saw the US attorney posts as patronage positions. UNSNIP
Levin told the committee this happened in 'early 2005,' according to the story. For the record, Carol Lam, U.S. Attorney for Southern California was one of the seven U.S. Attorneys dismissed on Dec. 7, 2006.
So just to be clear on this, the nation's top lawyer canned one of his top legal minds because the administration didn't think he would 'come out the right way' on fundamental matters of basic justice like, whether its okay to torture. Habeas corpus. Warrantless wiretapping (ie: the right for citizens to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to privacy). At the same time, he was working with Karl Rove, perhaps the most amoral political operative ever (and that's saying a lot) to purge the US Attorney ranks and replace the purged with political loyalists and hacks. I doubt these turkeys would have gotten as far as they did, had it not been for 9/11.
It's bad enough they took advantage of their citizens' collective fear and trauma to so dramatically pervert the American body politic, but what really makes the blood boil is their cockiness. You can see the arrogance in Bush's smirk, in Gonzalez' last appearance before Congress. It's the arrogance of people convinced they have all their bases covered.
'We don't torture,' Bush famously said as the horrors of Abu Ghraib unfolded to the world. We now know better, of course, but because they shoved out the people who might have acted as a check on them and replaced them with Loyal Bushies, they managed to craft legal justifications for what they did, created euphemisms so they could say perhaps, in the narrowest legal parsing possible, it wasn't exactly torture.
From the people who promised to 'restore dignity to the White House' indeed. If anything, it's practically an identical twin to Bill Clinton's famous "It depends on what your definitition of 'is,' is" remark during the Lewinsky scandal, only with thousands more dead people and the most fundamental of human freedoms trampled.
America is more than just a country. It's an idea, an experiment. Who or more accurately what, has lost the most since The War on Terror began?
h/t: Andrew Sullivan
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