The Rovian War Meanders On

Last week’s testimony by the pip-squeak Kyle Sampson finally convinced me that there may be hope for the good old US of A. I was glued to the television as the Senate went about its slow motion constitutional duty. I admit I found it rivetting. Who knew that Patrick Leahy was such a sly devil? Or that Chuck Schumer was such a street fighter? These guys chewed poor old Kyle up and spat him out in so many pieces that by the end of the day even I had begun to feel sad. He was pathetic. What a servile little creep. He is exactly the kind of twerp that Bush has hired and put in all sorts of places: faithful to a fault, religious zealot, just clever enough to be smarmy, but not clever enough to have any opinions of his own. In short [and he is short] he’s a revolting little excuse for a senior official of the Justice Department.

And just how good an official? We’ll never know because he seems to suffer form the most appalling memory lapses. Every time he was asked a tough question he seemed to have to reach back into the far distant past through some sort of bureaucratic fog that inevitably defeated his earnest attempts to recall what he meant by his actions or words. This was even when someone gave him an aid … like a copy of his own words. This tragic ailment has a remedy however: just get a Republican to ask the questions! Every time a red stater put a question the fog rolled away and Kyle’s perfect recall clicked into action. Presto! Out popped a perfectly formed and well articulted slice of pablum. This was particulalry true when Orrin Hatch, Utah’s finest, was the interlocuter. We are not supposed to mention that Kyle used to work for Hatch, so those perfect answers cannot possibly have been the result of collusion. Can they?

The spectacle brought into sharper focus what is at stake: on the Bush side is the undoing of much of his “imperial presidency”; for six years he was able to act as if Congress did not exist because the Republican leadership there decided never to exert any oversight. On the contrary, they went out of their way to aid and abet a whole series of actions that would have attracted serious objection in a balanced government. The Republicans threw the notion of “checks and balances” out the window, leaving Bush and his crew to devestate the effectiveness of government, trash the constitution, and pile up all sorts of damage to our economy along the way. No one in the Republican ranks [except Chuck Hagel] had the courage to speak out against what will surely go down in history as the single worst administration America has ever had. In contrast, on the Democratic side the ability to get hearings is a weapon they can use to slow Bush down and to begin the painful process of dismantling that self-same imperial executive. Coming from England I am used to conservatives defending the monarchy so it’s no surprise to hear Republicans defending Bush. But the stench of their hypocrisy is everywhere: they were outraged about Clinton’s lying to Congress, but Bush? No he isn’t criticized at all. When Gore used a White House telephone there was outrage. But apparently it’s just fine for Rove and his minions to conduct the nation’s business over the internet [where any self respecting country can spy on it] using the Republican National Committe’s web server … it’s against the law folks, wake up!

When someone like Kyle Sampson is presented as a senior official of the most powerful nation on earth, someone who works in the Jsutice Department, someone who his fans call “super-sharp” turns out to be a mealy mouthed, bureaucratic, know-nothing, paper-pusher we have a problem. As Senator Whitehouse form Rhode Island asked: “Do we have to be worried about the competence of the Justice Department?” Given Kyle’s total lack of any meaningful legal experience and his only skill being his undying fealty to Bush [he called himself a “Bushie” … how cute!] how can we expect him, as one of the top officials in law enforcement in the country, to have a clue? How many other departments of our government are stacked with idiots like Kyle? And how much incompetence is acceptable from all these pychophants before we toss them all out? Before you think I am making too much of Kyle, inspect Monica Goodling’s credentials for her top position: she’s a graduate from a Christian Bible College and did her law degree at Pat Buchanan’s school, she has never tried a case of any size and is one of the people Bush relied on [with Kyle] when he drew up a lsit of underperforming US Attorneys. Or how about the woman in the Wildlife and Fisheries Department who send s official e-mails to her fellow on-line gamers in order to discuss p0olicy matters?

Unfortunately the Katrina mess was exactly what we should have expected from this crowd of fools whose only criterion for selection was loyalty. Don’t forget that when the ill-fated Iraq reconstruction crew was put together the key requirement was not skill or experience, but was whether you voted for Bush and opposed abortion rights.

So low has America fallen that we did not find this all out until after the last eelction and oversight returned in the shape of people like Senators Leahy and Schumer.

Anyone who thinks this is a trivial “partisan fishing expedition” is nuts. This is an attempt to start the climb back to resepctability by a nation that has been royally trashed by an small, extreme, and very nasty crowd of manipulators who plugged up government with loyal fools in order to prevent us, the citizens, from finding out what they were up to. that’s un-American. That’s unpatriotic. And behind it all is Karl Rove. The master manipulator. All roads lead to Rove.

Go get him Leahy!