Monday, March 19, 2007
Politico: Gonzales Going, Going, Gone
Republican officials operating at the behest of the White House have begun seeking a possible successor to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose support among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has collapsed, according to party sources familiar with the discussions.
Among the names floated Monday by administration officials are Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and White House anti-terrorism coordinator Frances Townsend. Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson is a White House prospect. So is former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, but sources were unsure whether he would want the job.
Republican sources also disclosed that it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, whose incomplete and inaccurate congressional testimony about the prosecutors helped precipitate the crisis, will also resign shortly. Officials were debating whether Gonzales and McNulty should depart at the same time or whether McNulty should go a day or two after Gonzales. Still known as "The Judge" for his service on the Texas Supreme Court, Gonzales is one of the few remaining original Texans who came to Washington with President Bush.
In a sign of Republican despair, GOP political strategists on Capitol Hill said that it is too late for Gonzales' departure to head off a full-scale Democratic investigation into the motives and timing behind the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.
"Democrats smell blood in the water, and (Gonzales') resignation won't stop them," said a well-connected Republican Senate aide. "And on our side, no one's going to defend him. All we can do is warn Democrats against overreaching."
All they can do is warn Democrats against overreaching?
Who the fuck are they?
For six fucking years the Rubber Stamp Republican lapdogs took their marching orders from the White House, politicized EVERYTHING in Washington and shut down any opposition, any criticism, or any oversight of the administration and its attendant cronies
Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chair Pat Roberts took dictation from the White House when he was writing up the report on pre-war intelligence. We're STILL waiting for the second part of the report - you know, the part that was supposed to deal with whether members of the administration knowingly manipulated pre-war intel. Roberts sat on that report for years before Dems took over the Congress.
In addition, the old Rubber Stamp Republican Congress let Abu Gonzales and Dick Cheney write torture into United States law, render "terror suspects" to other countries to be tortured, and create secret prisons in Europe for these "suspects".
Here at home, Republicans allowed the preznut to read our emails, listen to our phone calls, open our mail, declare us "enemy combatants," send us to Gitmo where we can be held "in perpetuity" without ever knowing what charges have been leveled against us or ever seeing a lawyer.
Republicans spent years saying Dems "are against the troops" while over at Walter Reed Building 18, injured soldiers lived in a rodent-infested, mold-contaminated shitholes.
Now we are learning that members of this administration had U.S. attorneys fired so they could replace them with more pliant prosecutors who WOULDN'T investigate fellow members of the Grand Old Criminal Party and/or WOULD indict political opponents on flimsy charges at politically expedient times for Republicans (i.e., right before elections) and Republicans want to warn Dems not to overreach?
FUCK YOU GUYS AND YOUR BULLSHIT SPIN.
THERE CAN NOT BE ENOUGH OVERSIGHT HEARINGS NOW THAT THE CORRUPT REPUBLICAN LAPDOG CRONIES ARE OUT OF POWER AND FORCED TO WATCH AS DEMS SUBPOENA ALL THE CROOKS, LIARS, AND THIEVES IN THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE GRAND OLD CRIMINAL PARTY UP TO CAPITOL HILL FOR REAL HEARINGS WHERE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE TO TESTIFY UNDER OATH.
Let's get to the bottom of these scandals - particularly the prosecutor purge - and indict the people who need to be indicted, fire the people who need to be fired and if need be, start drawing up the articles of impeachment.
Gonzales may be going, going, gone.
But that's not enough.
What else is the White House hiding about the roles of the preznut, Harriet Miers, Karl Rove and others in the administration in this scandal?
And just what criminal investigations got cut short by the purge of the prosecutors?
UPDATE: Here's another example of the kind of oversight that could only happen now that Dems are in charge in Washington:
WASHINGTON, March 19 — Democratic lawmakers released documents today that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty or to play down evidence of a human role in global warming.
In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he made in government reports over several years, saying the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.
...The hearing included the first public statements on the issue by Mr. Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, Mr. Cooney was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby in Washington.
He was hired by Exxon Mobil after resigning in 2005 following reports on the editing in The New York Times. The White House said his resignation was not related to the disclosures.
Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on global warming gases for the oil industry had no bearing on his work once he joined the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.”
He added that he based his editing and recommendations on what he saw in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”
...The hearing was part of a continuing investigation, begun under the committee’s Republican chairman last year, of charges of political interference in climate science by the Bush administration.
It became a heated tug of war over the appropriate role of scientists and political appointees in framing how the government conveys information on global warming.
The hearing also produced the first sworn statements from George C. Deutsch III, now 25, who moved in 2005 from the Bush re-election campaign to public affairs jobs at NASA, where he warned career press officers to exert more control over James E. Hansen, the top climate expert at the space agency.
Testifying at the hearing, Dr. Hansen said that editing like that done by Mr. Cooney and efforts to limit scientists’ access to the press and public amounted to censorship and muddied the public debate over a pressing environmental issue.
“If public affairs offices are left under the control of political appointees, it seems to me that inherently they become offices of propaganda,” he said.
These are the kind of oversight hearings the Rubber Stamp Republicans and their enablers in the media (like David Broder) don't want us to have.
I guess Broder and company would rather have the 25 year p.r. guy from Bush/Cheney 04 working at NASA and censoring scientists about pressinbg environmental issues and the Exxon Mobil guy editing government reports to minimize the seriousness of global warming.
Assholes.
