My take at this point is Bush’s options are narrowing by the second vis-a-vis Gonzales. He has to let him go. Gonzales is now an open, festering wound on the protruding, exposed back-side of the republican party, and everyone’s pointing at it in disgust.
Folks were saying a few days ago that Sampson was being made into the Scooter Libby, or fall guy, of the Justice Dept. scandal, but I’d say it’d be more accurate to place Gonzales in that role.
Gonzales has always been mediocre and not a great intellect, by any stretch. The fact that he’s also a lying weasel just makes him easy to despise. Latching onto Bush’s coattails should have been the best thing he ever did for his career, but incompetence eventually, inevitably, always rises to the surface. However, inasmuch as Gonzales fulfilled his true role of circumventing and manipulating laws to Bush’s ultimate advantage he had a value.
Rove, however, is the Bush White House, and Bush knows where his bread is buttered. I believe Bush will throw anyone, even his old pal Al, into the wood chipper to Protect Rove, and it’s beginning to look like it may come to that.
That’s because Sampson was an ‘attempted fall guy’. Sadly for the Bushies, they offered him up before all the evidence was out.
If ol’ Dub wants to protect the rest of his cronies he might want to make sure that the rest of the incriminating information comes out before he puts Al’s plump neck on the chopping block.
No no! Sacrifice Al now! Then we can speculate about who will be tossed overboard next (and how many people are ahead of Rove in Dubya’s priority queue).
On a different note, stories like this seem to happen all the time and are proof that the government sucks at conspiracies. They can’t even keep something mundane like this hidden. At the very least, even if they can hide something for several years it’ll eventually come out either through declassified papers or people talking, like all that juicy CIA stuff from the Cold War.
In realization that he didn’t fall on his sword but was pushed onto it, he has now *requested * to testify to the Senate - says Schumer this AM, that is. Pull up a chair and bring some popcorn.
Eh, I doubt he was pushed onto his sword so much as ‘nudged’. Thing is, that’s what happens to all of them eventually.
The pertinent question is this: Why is a high-paying job-for-life at a “think tank” that involves absolutely no responsibility not enough of a payoff for this particular guy?
That’s fairly typical. Unless you’re in the very inner, inner circle (Rove, Meiers, Gonzales, Cheney, Rice) Loyalty Street in Dubya City is one-way restricted…
It’s a disgusting indictment on our political system that the thought would even cross our minds for those in goverment to employ Mafia-like tactics to get what they want, but I wouldn’t put it past this bunch.
Before we continue with this debate I think we need to remind ourselves that what the Admin is accused of – using the Justice Department for partisan political purposes – is not strictly speaking illegal. (Unless someone can cite contrary statutory authority?) It is simply something that is “not done.”
Which does not mean it might not be an impeachable offense (definition of which is a political, not a legal or judicial, decision), nor that other real crimes might not have been committed in the course of this business.
If the attorney prosecuting a case is removed from office for the purposes of preventing prosecution of a crime, it seems to me that we’re looking at some sort of conspiracy.
NPR’s program On The Media ran a story on March 16 about communications professor John Cragan’s study of the ratio of Democrats versus Republicans investigated or prosecuted under this administration. From the evidence available to him and his colleagues in the study, the ratio was 7:1. You can read more about it here.
While my gut reaction is to accept that the highly partisan (and politico-theological) beliefs of Bush and his successive AG henchmen would lend themselves to partisan enforcement, I would really prefer to see a similar study conducted on the Clinton era investigations before I leapt to the conclusion that this was more than politics as usual. Certainly, I will probably indulge myself with a bit of schadenfreude if Cragan’s survey turns out to provide one more example of the moral bankruptcy of the guy who claimed that he was going to restore morality to the White House, but if he is not guilty of this charge, he is already guilty of enough others that we should refrain from indulging in false (or premature) accusations.
The current flap seems pretty clear to me, but we have the evidence that the eight mid-term, same-party firings are extraordinary and the testimony that attorneys with good performance reviews were being fired for “poor performance.” I am not sure that we have similar evidence regarding Cragan’s study if we do not know what sort of trend such examinations typically follow from one administration to another.
