Gonzo Justice (7 comments )
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be spending the next fortnight rehearsing in front of a mock panel of questioners for his much-anticipated appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 17th. He wants his lies about turning over the Department of Justice to Karl Rove's political hatchet shop to be more satisfying than his extemporaneous remarks of March 13th.
GOP Senators like Arlen Specter and Jeff Sessions prattle as if they are truly concerned with the Republican top cop's false statements, but we know in the end they'll just close ranks behind their fellow partisan as they have done with all of the other abuses of power emanating from this rogue administration, (I won't deign to list them).
When the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress they were happy to rewrite the laws that George W. Bush had broken, such as their passage of the odious "Military Commissions Act," to clear their standard bearer ex post facto of wrongdoing. For Bush, it was like getting charged with a D.U.I. and then having his friends in the legislature change the acceptable blood alcohol level to make it go away.
But alas, the Senate will get nothing out of Gonzo; he'll just say: "I don't recall," or "I have no recollection," or "to the best of my recollection," and so on. His chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who looks like the lovechild of Karl Rove and George Castanza, told the Judiciary Committee 122 times that he could "not remember." Gonzo's memory is sure to be as selective as Sampson's. It's an old Richard Nixon trick. Nixon was caught on tape giving pointers to an aide about how to stymie a grand jury, "just say you don't remember," he advised.
Gonzales reminds me of Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, the last A.G. to run the D.o.J. as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. Mitchell holds the dishonor of being the only Attorney General in U.S. history to go to jail; he served nineteen months. With hope, Gonzo will someday join him in the history books for a similar distinction. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/gonzo-justice_b_44764.html