Honor Amongst Thieves

The goo that binds the Putsch junta

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/thieves.htm
4/15/07
 

There’s this one right winger running loose on Usenet who, on a daily basis, posts a message which has a header that reads something like “Oh my gawd! Gonzales is STILL Attorney General! Liberals having kittens!”

OK, the guy is a well known buffoon who will say anything if he thinks there’s a chance it will annoy liberals, and isn’t afraid to humiliate America or the GOP to that end. He’s part of what I’ve always thought of as the “Bool-yah!” crowd. Pep rally patriot, mindless and destructive to his own ends.

The trouble is that the White House, and the President of the United States, seem to have joined his ranks.

Case in point: Gonzales is still Attorney General.

One of the first rules in politics is that when a thunderstorm breaks over your head, DROP THE LIGHTNING ROD! Take the person who attracted all the unwelcome media attention and throw him to the wolves. The sooner you do this, the better, since a scandal in the paper that vanishes in a few days vanishes from the public consciousness overnight, but one that goes on and on eventually causes the public to wonder if there isn’t something to this scandal, and not only do they remember that the scandal is going on, but they start learning there really is something to it.

It’s corrosive, and the longer it goes on, the longer it WILL go on, and the more likely it is to spread. This is why finding someone and tossing him off the back of the sleigh is such a reliable process in politics for short circuiting such things.

Gonzales is still there, and, given the severity of the scandal, it’s possible that tossing him to the wolves wouldn’t have been enough. But keeping him as long as they have pretty much guarantees that nothing the administration does now will be enough. Nixon’s presidency was destroyed over less.

We’ve watched the scandal spread, and now it includes former Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, some of the attorneys who were NOT fired, and increasing details about those that were, and why.

We’ve learned that there were millions of emails in a shadowy party-run computer network in the White House, and that some four years of such messages have supposedly gone missing. The GOP has claimed that they set up such a system in order to avoid violating the Hatch Act, which forbids party business on the public dime, but that rings hollow in light of conferences at the Department of Justice and the GAO in which party operatives gave lectures on how to ensure Republican elections in ‘08. It was also meant to obscure the fact that conducting public business on such a party network is, in itself, a grave violation of federal law, and if the aim was to keep those activities from the public (and it almost certainly was), then conspiracy and fraud laws come into play, too.

We’ve watched Gonzales, slowly wilting as his date to testify before Congress nears, change his story over and over. He wasn’t a part of the process that led to the firings. Then it turned out he chaired them. OK, he chaired them, but he wasn’t really paying attention. More evidence emerged showing he was playing close attention, so OK, he was paying attention, but only so he could properly supervise his assistant – the same assistant he now claims he didn’t know was misbehaving in the first place. Now he’s planning to say its all her fault. Turns out, by the way, that she’s a religious extremist, according to Paul Krugman. That’s not unusual with this administration, though.

They insisted that the firings were not preplanned, and now it turns out that they had a list drawn up a full year earlier.

The New York Times realized this was a golden opportunity to act like a real newspaper, and started investigating some of the attorneys that were not fired, and right away, came across one who was running her office on such a strong ideological basis (with Bushie overtones of batshit religious nuttery) that three of her top assistants had resigned their positions just to get away from her. I’m sure we’ll be hearing similarly lurid tales from some of the other US Attorneys who were deemed “good Bushies” and allowed to keep their jobs.

Paul Krugman wrote a column this past week about the large number of religious extremists in the Putsch administration. He didn’t use the term, but to those of us who have been warning of a stealthy desecularization of America by the religious right since the 1980s, the concept came immediately: Crony Religionism. It’s similar to Crony Capitalism in that you have a group of people acting outside the law and in stealth in order to advance their own interests in defiance of what the public may need or want. Cabals, if you will.

All of which brings us around to the initial question: Why is Gonzales still Attorney General when it’s obviously bringing nothing but harm to him, the GOP, and the administration?

Columnists have all mentioned how personal loyalty counts above all in the Putsch junta. You are loyal to Putsch above all, or you are the enemy. Putsch, in turn, is loyal to you. Sounds kinda charming, doesn’t it?

The trouble is it’s the enforced loyalty of the cabal. These are cronies; crony capitalists, crony Christians, crony criminals. Virtually everything they stand for goes against virtually everything America stands for. Their loyalty isn’t loyalty based on ethics and honor; this is the loyalty of the Sopranos, of the terror cell, of the numbers racket. This is loyalty enforced in order to avoid exposure and accountability. You cross Tony, Tony has a dream that you are being attacked by ducks, which tells him you are disloyal, and a few days later you are perforated in the pine barrens. The Putsch junta kinda works that way, too, only without good scripting or acting.

As bad as things have become for Putsch for standing besides the vile Gonzales, the simple fact of the matter is that he stands beside him because things will only get much worse if he doesn’t.

And of course, we’re at a stage where it’s going to get worse no matter what.

Even the Supreme Court can’t save Putsch from his own cabalistic tendencies this time.