More Scandal

I know you think I’m obsessed by this US Attorney scandal, and you’re right. I don’t apologize for that. The confrontation between a corrupt regime like Bush’s and a Congresss trying to sort out the mess and surface the rot is gripping theatre. This will probably be a historic moment so I am going to savour every minute.

With that said: one of the reasons, within the ever shifting sands of the Gonzales reasoning process, given for the firing of the original eight US Attorneys was that they were underperforming. By now this reason seems quaint because it has been both superseded and debunked. However we can still poke fun at it, even though poking fun at the Bush regime is so easy currently it almost seems unfair to try. But no, I cannot resist when such easy pickings are available as this story from Montana:

Our friend David Inglesias the fired US Attorney fron New Mexico was fired because he was “underperforming” due to his frequent long absences from the office. For those of you who are following the story closely you already know that it turns out he was away on Naval Reserve duty and so the Justice Department actually appears to have broken the law by firing him for this reason. Laughable, and lamentable, though that is the gist of my story today is centered elsewhere: on a worthy US Attorney who was not fired but actually is totally absent, permanently, from his office, and is not away on national service. Apparently he managed to survive the scrutiny of the Justice Department’s zealots who were weeding out the absentee folks like Inglesias. That may be because he’s one of the zealots.

Yes people, hypocrisy is so rampant in the Bush regime that when they make up the lies to cover their tracks they expose themselves to our ridicule. The attorney in question is a certain Bill Mercer who is permanently absent from his Montana office because he is currently working inside the Washington office helping oversee, and fire, other US Attorneys. His absenteeism has been the subject of complaints from the judges of Montana who say Mercer’s office is a shambles and needs urgent fixing. The chief judge in Mercer’s district even wrote to Gonzales to complain, he even went so far as to say, on the record in a court hearing, that Mercer had “no credibilty, … none!”. Did this elicit action from HQ? No, of course not. Gonzales wrote back to say he thought Mercer was handling the job “admirably”.

I suppose the job Gonzales was talking about was the purge of other attorneys. Mercer was a key architect of that purge. You know: the one that has gone so smoothly.

I can’t wait for Leahy to ask Gonzales about this one.

You really can’t make this stuff up. The Justice Department is so incompetent and so politicised no one can refer any significant legal questions to it anymore. No one can trust a word anyone there says. The epicenter of our legal system has been taken over by ideological and religious zealots who think it is a fine platform for executing a political agenda rather than a place to manage and preserve our laws.

As I said: this scandal is both big and great theatre.