Monday, August 27, 2007

Going...Going....Gone-zales

Well, that's over. Abu G is history. The worst Attorney General in the history of the republic is stepping down effective 17 September. It's about god-damned time.

He is one of the authors of the current torture doctrine, he assisted the overthrow of the Constitution by promoting the fiction of the Unitary Executive.

Then he became Attorney General and he really got down to some serious desecration. His lasting legacy is the politicization of the Department of Justice, and it will take decades to undo the damage done. With Gonzales at the helm, the DoJ became the enforcement arm of the Republican party. Georgia Thompson was imprisoned and lost her home for the crime of working for a Democratic administration in the state of Wisconsin.

It matters that 'some lawyers got fired' because they were fired for not filing phony charges against Democratic candidates to sway elections to the Republican party. It is close to home for me, because I live in a city where a U.S. Attorney was fired and replaced with a hack, and he filed suits on specious claims and managed to sway the mayors race in Kansas City and derail the career of a rising star of the Democratic Party here in Jackson County.

In his farewell statement he thanked the resident for "the opportunity to serve the American people." This made me sputter coffee onto my monitor. He never served the American people. He served the president, and we could go straight to hell.

What happened at the Department of Justice matters every bit as much as the criminal and unjust occupation of Iraq, because it struck from within, at the very heart of the republic, and that , my friends, is a far greater threat to the American way of life than any terrorist ever managed to dream of being. Under Gonzales, the Congress was told that the courts would not enforce contempt charges or enforce subpoenas. Pure hackery, at it's most craven and corrupt.

He leaves a sad legacy as a partisan political hack who was given power he did not deserve and could not handle, and whose bumbling and inept mis-leadership crippled the Department of Justice and undermined the public trust in that system so vital in an open system of representative government like we are supposed to have.

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