The Fossils of Our Time
535 more days my cheery little countdown clock tells me!
Mr. Blumenthal at Salon seems to be in high dudgeon and possibly consequent doldrums. And why not? He's writing exceptional stuff on a week-in and week-out basis in a medium that is mostly serving those of us who already are groping with the real world on its' terms. Most of the non-net media seem to be either continuing to boot-lick for their masters (e.g. absolutely pathetic and shameful pure and puerile propaganda by warmongers Pollack and O'Hanlon published without even a disclaimer or apparent shred of embarrassment by the NYT this week) or in their chronic doldrum-state. I have no expectation that the dog-days now upon us will suddenly trigger some unprecedented fit of actual journalism, activism, or effectiveness out there where sycophancy is the key social attribute (Russert and Mathews et al show no signs of suddenly growing a spine, and Moyers obviously scares the bejesus out of the establishment wimps) . So anyone interested in regaining the standing position, taking pressure off those classically inflated North-American glutes and getting the fight with depression going on a fair basis - as long as we've gone this far go ahead and open your eyes! - has little choice but to surf. The web, the Internets, the tubes, whatever. Get thee to an Internet!
But Sidney, you are a true gem, every Thursday like clockwork at Salon. You go:
Omertà (or a code of silence) has become the final bond holding the Bush administration together. Honesty is dishonorable; silence is manly; penitence is weakness. Loyalty trumps law. Protecting higher-ups is patriotism. Stonewalling is idealism. Telling the truth is informing. Cooperation with investigators is cowardice; breaking the code is betrayal. Once the code is shattered, however, no one can be trusted and the entire edifice crumbles.
If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were miraculously to tell the truth, or if he were to resign or be removed, the secret government of the past six years would be unlocked. So long as a Republican Congress rigorously engaged in enforcing no oversight was smugly complicit through its passive ignorance and abdication of constitutional responsibility, the White House was secure in enacting its theories of the imperial presidency. An executive bound only by his self-proclaimed fiat in his capacity as commander in chief became his own law in authorizing torture and warrantless domestic wiretapping and data mining. Following the notion of the unitary executive, in which the departments and agencies have no independent existence under the president, the White House has relentlessly politicized them. Callow political appointees dictate to scientists, censoring or altering their conclusions. Career staff professionals are forced to attend indoctrination sessions on the political strategies of the Republican Party in campaigns and elections. And U.S. attorneys, supposedly impartial prosecutors representing the Department of Justice in the states, are purged if they deviate in any way from the White House's political line.
Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that William R. Steiger, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, suppressed the 2006 "Call to Action on Global Health" report of U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, which explained the connection of poverty to health and urged that attacking diseases become a major U.S. international commitment. Steiger, who has no credentials in the field, is the son of a former congressman who was Vice President Cheney's earliest patron, giving Cheney his first congressional job as a staff intern. At the White House's behest, Steiger acts as a micromanaging political commissar. His insistence on approving every single overseas appointee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left many of its posts empty. "Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in April. "At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008." Such is the theory of the unitary executive in action.
Just this week, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the New Yorker about the suspicion that fell on the U.S. attorney in Washington state, John McKay, who was fired in the wholesale purge because of his interest in devoting full resources to an investigation of the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney, Tom Wales, who had been a prominent local advocate of gun control. On July 31, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Va., John Brownlee, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the night before a guilty verdict was delivered in his case against the drug manufacturing company that produced OxyContin, he received a call from a Justice Department official asking him to slow down his prosecution.
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Gonzales is a unique figure of disrepute in the history of the Justice Department, a cipher, enabler and useful idiot who was nonetheless indispensable in the rise of his patron and whose survival is elemental to that of the administration. Warren G. Harding's attorney general, Harry Daugherty, trailing accusations of bribery for which he was never indicted, resigned after Harding's death. Daugherty had been one of Harding's creators as the Republican Party chairman of Ohio. Two of Richard Nixon's attorneys general resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal, both significant political men: John Mitchell, Nixon's former law partner and campaign chairman, and Richard Kleindienst, an important player in the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party of Arizona.
Gonzales earned the gratitude and indebtedness of Bush in 1996, when he enabled him to escape jury duty in Travis County, Texas, on the attenuated argument that as governor he might find himself in a conflict of interest in the future when considering a clemency or pardon. In fact, Bush's worry was filling out the juror's form that required listing arrests. By avoiding acknowledgement of his drunken-driving violation, Bush maintained his political viability. Grants of clemency and pardons never bothered Bush again. Of the 152 people condemned to execution in Texas during his tenure, the most under any governor in modern American history, he indulged in not a single act of clemency. His counsel, Alberto Gonzales, briefed him on 57 of these cases, and "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," according to a study published by the Atlantic.
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In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind we cannot tolerate their obstruction
(P. Kantner)
Mr. Blumenthal at Salon seems to be in high dudgeon and possibly consequent doldrums. And why not? He's writing exceptional stuff on a week-in and week-out basis in a medium that is mostly serving those of us who already are groping with the real world on its' terms. Most of the non-net media seem to be either continuing to boot-lick for their masters (e.g. absolutely pathetic and shameful pure and puerile propaganda by warmongers Pollack and O'Hanlon published without even a disclaimer or apparent shred of embarrassment by the NYT this week) or in their chronic doldrum-state. I have no expectation that the dog-days now upon us will suddenly trigger some unprecedented fit of actual journalism, activism, or effectiveness out there where sycophancy is the key social attribute (Russert and Mathews et al show no signs of suddenly growing a spine, and Moyers obviously scares the bejesus out of the establishment wimps) . So anyone interested in regaining the standing position, taking pressure off those classically inflated North-American glutes and getting the fight with depression going on a fair basis - as long as we've gone this far go ahead and open your eyes! - has little choice but to surf. The web, the Internets, the tubes, whatever. Get thee to an Internet!
But Sidney, you are a true gem, every Thursday like clockwork at Salon. You go:
Omertà (or a code of silence) has become the final bond holding the Bush administration together. Honesty is dishonorable; silence is manly; penitence is weakness. Loyalty trumps law. Protecting higher-ups is patriotism. Stonewalling is idealism. Telling the truth is informing. Cooperation with investigators is cowardice; breaking the code is betrayal. Once the code is shattered, however, no one can be trusted and the entire edifice crumbles.
If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were miraculously to tell the truth, or if he were to resign or be removed, the secret government of the past six years would be unlocked. So long as a Republican Congress rigorously engaged in enforcing no oversight was smugly complicit through its passive ignorance and abdication of constitutional responsibility, the White House was secure in enacting its theories of the imperial presidency. An executive bound only by his self-proclaimed fiat in his capacity as commander in chief became his own law in authorizing torture and warrantless domestic wiretapping and data mining. Following the notion of the unitary executive, in which the departments and agencies have no independent existence under the president, the White House has relentlessly politicized them. Callow political appointees dictate to scientists, censoring or altering their conclusions. Career staff professionals are forced to attend indoctrination sessions on the political strategies of the Republican Party in campaigns and elections. And U.S. attorneys, supposedly impartial prosecutors representing the Department of Justice in the states, are purged if they deviate in any way from the White House's political line.
Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that William R. Steiger, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, suppressed the 2006 "Call to Action on Global Health" report of U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, which explained the connection of poverty to health and urged that attacking diseases become a major U.S. international commitment. Steiger, who has no credentials in the field, is the son of a former congressman who was Vice President Cheney's earliest patron, giving Cheney his first congressional job as a staff intern. At the White House's behest, Steiger acts as a micromanaging political commissar. His insistence on approving every single overseas appointee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left many of its posts empty. "Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in April. "At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008." Such is the theory of the unitary executive in action.
Just this week, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the New Yorker about the suspicion that fell on the U.S. attorney in Washington state, John McKay, who was fired in the wholesale purge because of his interest in devoting full resources to an investigation of the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney, Tom Wales, who had been a prominent local advocate of gun control. On July 31, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Va., John Brownlee, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the night before a guilty verdict was delivered in his case against the drug manufacturing company that produced OxyContin, he received a call from a Justice Department official asking him to slow down his prosecution.
-clip-
Gonzales is a unique figure of disrepute in the history of the Justice Department, a cipher, enabler and useful idiot who was nonetheless indispensable in the rise of his patron and whose survival is elemental to that of the administration. Warren G. Harding's attorney general, Harry Daugherty, trailing accusations of bribery for which he was never indicted, resigned after Harding's death. Daugherty had been one of Harding's creators as the Republican Party chairman of Ohio. Two of Richard Nixon's attorneys general resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal, both significant political men: John Mitchell, Nixon's former law partner and campaign chairman, and Richard Kleindienst, an important player in the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party of Arizona.
Gonzales earned the gratitude and indebtedness of Bush in 1996, when he enabled him to escape jury duty in Travis County, Texas, on the attenuated argument that as governor he might find himself in a conflict of interest in the future when considering a clemency or pardon. In fact, Bush's worry was filling out the juror's form that required listing arrests. By avoiding acknowledgement of his drunken-driving violation, Bush maintained his political viability. Grants of clemency and pardons never bothered Bush again. Of the 152 people condemned to execution in Texas during his tenure, the most under any governor in modern American history, he indulged in not a single act of clemency. His counsel, Alberto Gonzales, briefed him on 57 of these cases, and "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," according to a study published by the Atlantic.
-clip-
In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind we cannot tolerate their obstruction
(P. Kantner)
posted by Sir Gumbo at 9:50 PM
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