The Slimeball Presidency, Part II.

Alberto Gonzales will probably be confirmed as the new Attorney General, despite his having forwarded and approved of the president subverting the law and ordering torture on suspects. This would be achieved by granting immunity to those the president ordered to torture people–effectively using the the president’s power to commit illegal acts at will. If this sounds slightly Nixonian, it is because it is–the assumption that the president is above the law. You thought Ashcroft was bad?

Let’s not forget that Gonzales is really not much more than a class-A flunky for Bush, who got his start as counselor to Bush as governor of Texas, whose main distinction was that he got Bush out of trouble when Bush’s attempt to look like an everyman by doing jury duty backfired when it threatened to expose Bush’s drunk driving conviction. Gonzales was the one who got Bush out with the weaseling “logic” that the governor should not be part of a jury that decides the sentence of a person who might appeal for clemency to the governor–as if there was more than a one-in-a-billion chance that a nobody convicted of a drunk-driving charge would be asking the governor for a pardon, or that it would really present any kind of conflict whatsoever. More recently, Gonzales was the one responsible for vetting Bernard Kerik, a job which he failed at miserably. This guy’s supposed to be our top lawman?

I am a little surprised, actually, that the right wing hasn’t pulled out the old “Democrats are racists for opposing our extremist right-wing nutcase nominee because s/he’s a minority” chestnut, but maybe that’s just because it looks like Gonzales will pass. Whoopee for us.

And then there’s the revelation that the Bush administration paid out nearly a quarter of a million dollars as a bribe to a conservative black journalist to push the president’s agenda on education to the people who would most likely get hurt by it. The grateful reporter gave air time to Bush staffers and even urged other journalists to push the same agenda.

This is a bit similar to the time when the Bush administration abused their funding powers to create fake news stories about Bush’s Medicare program (complete with fake news reporters) which acted as Bush campaign commercials, and then get local stations to run them as if they were real news. Of course, this all should be of little surprise, considering the Bush administration’s success in turning the journalistic community into a harem of whores for the administration, but an outright bribe like this has got to be illegal. So what will happen? Just add it to the list of felonies committed by this administration so it can just lay there for a while and be ignored and eventually dismissed.

One thing that these two items bring in to focus is that this administration considers itself above the law, and has no qualms about doing whatever it desires to subvert or just outright break the law of the land. There’s your “values” for you.