Yesterday I was all caught up with the awfulness of Gonzalez and Card badgering an ill, and sedated, John Ashcroft, to sign off on a program he and his department had declared not legal, and missed the simple fact, highlighted and expanded upon by Glenn Greenwald that lying at the heart of this tragi-comic Keystone Kops scene (I dispute the idea that it's like a thriller; it's more a parody of a thriller, with Leslie Nielsen as Card and Jim Belushi as Gonzalez) is the President of the United States overruling his own Justice Department, moving forward with a program they had decided was not legal. So desperate for the patina of legitimacy an Ashcroft Justice Department might provide, Bush demanded that his servants intrude upon the health and healing of a very ill man in order to do so. That he would not says more about how horrid the program was and is than anything else. This is John Ashcroft, after all.
As Greenwald notes at the end of his piece, had we a functioning journalist class in this country, not a bunch of nitwits by turns sycophants and courtiers, this story would be huge - even bigger than Jerry Falwell's casket, Paris Hilton's jail time, or another crotch-shot of Lindsay Lohan. The indictment of the press is only secondary to the real travesty here - we are saddled with this clearly criminal bunch for nearly two more years, even though most Americans despise them, and some wish the Democrats would grow a pair and get busy ending the war and dragging their sorry butts before an impeachment panel. The evidence is clear. The noose should be tightening around these guys, but isn't only out of political cowardice.
Virtual Tin Cup
