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The decision to name Judge Laurence Silberman to co-chair the WMD commission is fascinating and repugnant.
With the exception of Scalia or Clarence Thomas, Bush could not have chosen a less respected and more partisan member of the bench to lead this crew on its wayward, pointless journey. (Predicted 03/31/05 "finding": Hey, guess what? The intelligence was screwed up, sort of. There were some CIA/DIA/NSA/State guys who said to take all this 'evidence' with a grain of salt, but let's not be too upset they weren't listened to. ... What's that? You wanna know how the administration interpreted/misrepresented/ignored the data? Oh, sorry, that's not our brief!)
Even draped in robes, Silberman is nothing but a waterboy for all things GOP. He freed North and Poindexter with the spurious argument that their prosection was ipso facto tainted by their immunized testimony before Congress; from the bench, he claimed Clinton was waging war against the United States when the president was trying to shield the Secret Service from testifying in the Starr probe; David Brock says Silberman, while drawing pay as a federal, unbiased judge, mind you, was engaged wholeheartedly in the background efforts to rip Clinton from his presidential moorings.
Yet there must be dozens of Republican judges throughout the country who have NOT engaged in partisan activity on the bench and thus still enjoy the respect of their brethren and others.
Bush is too dumb to have realized that the name "Silberman" would resonate like a lightning rod among the legions of Democrats whom the judge has attempted to cudgel throughout his professional career. Thanks to the naming of Silberman, this commission's conclusions are D.O.A. before they're even spawned.
A White House "adviser," laden with the task of finding an "acceptable" (wink-wink) choice but crossing his/her fingers that the revulsion at the choice would be minimal, must have suggested Silberman as an honest broker to the dimwit in charge. Who was it?
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