Thank you, BrainGlutton, I really appreciate your taking the time to detail that. I wasn’t sure where to start here.
Did you notice Apos is a guest? Holy cow, come back come back!
Anyway - my husband typically follows politics more closely than I do (and hates Bush even more than I do), and he, too, was unaware of the real scandal. Seems like bloggers are the true “free press” these days.
No. It’s even more conditional than that. If Palast’s interpretation of what Igleasias said is right… Nothing that he quoted from Iglesias points to anything illegal or even unethical. So, yeah, if pigs had wings they could fly.
Look, if Congress wants to impeach Bush that’s fine with me. But it’s not going to be about this. There’s no “there” there.
Reread the whole article. It’s not just Palast’s interpretation. It was Iglesias himself who called the Admin’s actions “wrong and illegal and unethical.” He also asserted flat-out that Domenici pressured Bush to pressure Gonzales to pressure Iglesias to bring “bogus voter fraud” cases; that would be wrong and illegal and unethical, on Domenici’s part, and Bush’s, and Gonzales’.
I read the whole article. You are confusing what Iglesias said, as quoted by Palast, with what Palast is saying.
It was Iglesias, not Palast, who applied the phrase “bogus voter fraud” to the prosecutions Gonzales pressured him to bring. It was Iglesias who said, “You know US Attorneys and the Justice Department have a history of not taking into consideration partisan politics. That should not be a factor. And what they tried to do is just wrong and illegal and unethical.”
Gonzales, not Bush. I rest my case.
However, no one has provided anything resembling evidence that Bush knew that Domenici was m,aking up his claims. We already know that the DoJ was involved in unethical and unlawful behavior. The claim made FOR WHICH NO EVIDENCE HAS BEEN OFFERED is that Bush ordered the unlawful activities, (or, at least, the sacking of those Attorneys General who would not comply because they would not comply with unlawful behavior).
Regarding this thread, there is no there there.
Is investigating rape a legitimate activity of a district attorney?
Is Mike Nifong a blameless public servant who has been foully traduced?
If your answers to questions (1) and (2) differ in any way, explain… because we all wait with baited breath.
But Iglesias also claims to know (without explaining the basis of that knowledge) that Gonzales was simply passing along Bush’s orders.
Dude, I didn’t understand what he was saying, so I asked a question. He never answered, so I still don’t know what he was saying. Got any more questions? 
Well, not yet WRT Bush. When a Federal DA makes public allegations of unethical, unlawful etc. behavior on the part of Gonzo and Domenici, don’t you think we ought to maybe, say, listen just a little? Maybe investigate further? Instead of just proclaiming “there is no there there?”
No, Palast said that. You should go back and reread the article.
Really, John? No clue? After all this time, all these threads, your knowledge of the subject at hand is so limited, you don’t know? This is the first you’ve heard that the power of the SAG might have been ill-used, in order to sustain a Republican grasp on power?
All of this is news to you?
No, it was Iglesias:
In particulars, perhaps. But if W pays any attention at all to his advisors, including Rove and Cheney, he has no excuse for not knowing that the “voter fraud” issue in general terms is pure-D bullshit and a cynical election-rigging ploy; it’s there in their public statements (quoted/linked in several of the posts, forget which ones, enumerated in post #20 above) if you read between the lines, or even read the plain language. Nor does he have any excuse (other than never reading the newspapers) for being ignorant of this story (which, admittedly, might fall outside the relevant time period – when was Iglesias fired?).
We (through the Congress) are investigating possible criminal acts involving Gonzales and Domenici. We also have a lot of threads already discussing the ramifications and evidence regarding those alleged crimes. (I believe crimes were committed.)
The “no there there” refers to the OP of this thread that starts out admitting that we have no idea how Igesias came to the conclusion that Bush was involved. And, as has already been pointed out, Iglesias’s own claims actually exonerate the president until such time as actual evidence has been produced. Domenici is reputed to have told Bush that Iglesias was not investigating voter fraud with sufficient intensity.
Even Iglesias does not say that Domenici complained to Bush that Iglesias was failing to file trumped up charges.
Bush has been sufficiently guilty of enough wrongful acts that we can fill up columns of posts with their recounting. Debating a point without any serious information really does fall into the category of mental masturbation.
There is an assumption that falls under its own weight. Since Day One of his presidency, a standard complaint against President Bush is that he does not pay attention to his advisors. Beyond that, there is no reason to believe that Rove and company would actually take their dirty deeds to the president to apprise him of those actions.
Far safer to carry out the dirty work without letting him see that information so that he does not inadvertantly mention it in some tangentially related discussion and grab the attention of the media and Congress.
As to the rules that have been violated regarding the mixing of politics and law enforcement, most of those have only been publicized since the investigations began. I would agree that most of them make sense and that Bush should have been aware of the principles, (without necessarily knowing that his lackeys were violating them), but there is no reason to expect him to have known of the particulars prior to their presentation to the American public–he is just not that curious about things to have bothered learning them and he had no national experience prior to the presidency through which he would have learned them through osmosis.
“Plausible deniability,” eh? Well, it worked well enough for the Reagan Admin. :mad:
Seems to have. It is still pretty easy to find people who think that Ollie North was a rogue who had no connection to the administration.
I am not claiming that Bush had no involvement with the Attorney General purge.
I am pointing out that a thread in which we are supposed to “debate” some issue for which we have no substantive information and the little information we have is inconclusive simply ties up a part of the board where we could be haveing a thorough dialogue along the lines of “There’s no god/is too/is not/. . .” With all the information we do have regarding the firing of the AGs, why have one more thread that is founded on the sand of an ambiguous claim by a disgruntled victim? Would it not make more sense to go out and find information that demonstrated genuine involvement by Gonzales, Rove, (or even Bush), than to make a big deal about something that, based on the evidence, does not even make Bush look bad?
Does too.