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So Impeach Gonzales

So Impeach Gonzales

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President Bush won’t fire his long-time friend U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales… he has too much to lose. He’s used to being able to say – “Here’s how I want it to be – you figure out the legal stuff.”

On Monday President Bush once again expressed his support: “I stand by Al Gonzales.” He accused Senators involved in the push for a no-confidence vote against Gonzales as engaging in “pure political theater,” despite the fact that many Republicans as well as Democrats have called for and/or support his resignation.

According to James Comey, who was acting Attorney General when Ashcroft was in the hospital, Gonzales and then chief-of-staff Andrew Card tried an end run around him by secretly visiting Ashcroft there in the middle of the night. Who knew? Ashcroft, whatever his faults, refused to reauthorize the secret wiretapping program. Notice how long he lasted…

In nominating Alberto Gonzales to be the next attorney general, President Bush has selected a man with a long record of giving him the kind of legal advice he wants. Unfortunately, that advice has not always been of the highest professional or ethical caliber. Gonzales is perhaps best known for a controversial January 2002 memorandum to the president in which he argued that Geneva Convention proscriptions on torture did not apply to Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners, and that the conventions are, in fact, “obsolete.”*

Gonzales is supposed to be working for the American people. He’s supposed to be running the Department of Justice. Let’s be serious. He’s the legal arm of Bush. In 1994, he was named general counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, and in 1997 appointed by Bush as Secretary of State of Texas, and in 1999 named to the Texas Supreme Court by the then-Gov. He’s been with Bush all the way.

He has largely succeeded in destroying the Department of Justice – was that the intent? Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty (Comey’s successor) recently resigned. Professionals that still try to work there are demoralized. They are also surrounded by inexperienced hacks and cronies – like Monica Goodling. Sheesh. How many graduates of Robertson or Falwell U work over there anyway? Do we have workers from Halliburton, Exxon, and Enron too?

Even before the attorney firings, which were clearly motivated by a right-wing agenda, there was enough to impeach him on.

Gonzales is not just Bush’s yes man. I wonder if Bush might be Gonzales’ yes man. Maybe he and Cheney… no, that’s just speculation.

Whatever. Like Cheney, Gonzales is one scary dude. He has actively subverted the Constitution while under oath to protect and defend it.

His role is to promote executive power. He has argued for presidential powers of a “unitary executive” (sounds like a king or a dictator, right? right!). Constitutionally speaking, Bush is commander in chief of the Army and Navy – but not the commander of every government employee, and certainly not commander of the citizenry.

On Gonzales’ advice (and I’m thinking, under significant direction) President George W. Bush has added objections to laws he has signed into law – they basically say that it’s the law, unless he decides it’s not. With Gonzales’ approval, Bush has withheld requested information – on dozens of issues – from Congress. Executive Order 13233, drafted by Gonzales and issued by George W. Bush on November 1, 2001 attempted to place limitations on the Freedom of Information Act by restricting access even to the records of former presidents.

In violation of the spirit of America (not to mention various U.S. statutes and international treaties), Gonzales authored the torture memos, giving a green light from the top for the use of overly-aggressive interrogations for enemy combatants. Oddly, there are no POWs at all. The definition of an enemy combatant is anyone Bush labels as an “enemy combatant” – including U.S. citizens. Since the first wave of what will be the continuing scandal of Abu Graib (you ain’t heard nothin’ yet), we’ve outsourced much of our torture. You may have heard something about that.

Gonzales wrote the Presidential Order which authorized the use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects, and has fought for shortened or endlessly deferred trials for enemy combatants. He has stated that he doesn’t believe that habeas corpus is constitutional. We should close Guantanamo immediately – for a lot of reasons – and tell detainees what they are charged with – or call them POWs and give them those rights. They are American prisoners. They should be in Levenworth or another high-security prison under American law.

Gonzales had a heavy role in approving electronic surveillance without a warrant – in defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (at least – we still don’t know how far that has gone or will go). I won’t even get into the multiple issues revolving around the so-called Patriot Acts.

Gonzales’ testimony has been misleading at best. He has not been honest or forthright. Yet unlike Monica Goodling, he doesn’t even have the decency to openly plead the fifth. He giggles at times as he dances around the questions he’s been asked. He’s confident. Isn’t it odd that Bush continues to stonewall against asking him to resign?

Congress has one option: Impeach him! While you still can!

Democracy for America and Greenwald have set up a petition to demand that Congress get serious about holding an errant executive branch to account. Check out the Brave New Films video and sign on:

Impeach Gonzales
http://impeachgonzales.org/

We, The Undersigned, urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin the process of impeachment of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in accordance with Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which provides for removal of the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States. We believe the process will prove that Atty. General Gonzales has committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors, including the abuse of power and violation of the public trust, both impeachable offenses.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlOBPNr7Kg[/youtube]

Laughing at Attempted Theocracy

Laughing at Attempted Theocracy

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You’ve probably heard by now (via the attorney firing scandal, Monica Goodling) that the Bush administration has appointed more than 150 graduates of Regent (Pat Robertson‘s 29-year-old bottom-tier law school) to prominent positions in the US government. No?

Regent itself estimates that “approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work.” Their students aren’t interested in attending top-ranked universities which might challenge them. They want to become “God’s instrument” in changing the policies – and perhaps even the very nature – of the U.S. government.

Mark Crispin Miller comments on the danger of simply laughing off the agendas of schools like Regent while such institutions continue to place their (undereducated?) graduates in influential governmental positions.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQRucOONJxw[/youtube]

I completely agree with Mark about the dangers of creeping theocracy, but I still enjoyed the comedic takes of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. Humor is also a good way of spreading information; it’s more contagious.

Just a spoonful of sugar…

Both of these examples were more informative than the network news programs that I saw. They both used comparisons to frustrate and mutate the stream of associations that people might have with the idea of the “university.” OK, the poke at Univ. of Phoenix was a little mean, but other than that…

I would be willing to bet a hunk of precious pennies that more Americans get their news and political information through satire and humor than via the news. They watch for entertainment, and they get some information too.

What’s the harm? It might spark an interest, and get them to research things for themselves. They’ll google it, they’ll check out the shelves at the library and the bookstore, and maybe even look through some other kinds of publications. They might try to reconcile conflicting information, collect evidence, make judgments. Independent thinking! Woo-hoo!

People need lines of flight – we are complex.

That’s why (for example) fundamentalists are all wrong to try to ban Halloween. Halloween already served their purposes by reframing and trivializing older religious traditions. If you follow the history of almost any community celebration, you’ll find all sorts of interesting overlaps and reversals. Halloween served to absorb and defuse those older traditions, overlaying them with new meanings. Now, by being “purist” or “fundamentalist,” they take away the carnivalesque, upside-down fun time. In Jungian terms, instead of embracing and taming the shadow they repress it and give it strength.

It is possible to take something heavily, and then a bit lightly. We do it all the time, and I believe it is probably part of the toolkit for human adaptability. Humor – and fiction – are survival tools. We tell stories, and we retell stories, and they change a bit in the retelling because the bits that are relevant are in a different context.

That is why there are traditions of the prankster and the jester and the representative of chaos. Life can only exist and thrive on the borders of order and chaos – either one alone will kill us. We live in the magical zone of transformations and patterns.

As others have pointed out, humor and satire can function to reaffirm the status quo by providing a little relief from order and law. Think pressure cooker. A little steam is let out to prevent an explosion. Some kinds of humor can even be hurtful.

Still, I’ve always thought that the complete lack of humor eventually helps to push a movement into its downfall. Think of how shrill people can become when they are focused on one issue that is very important to them. The more fanatical people get, the less they can laugh at themselves, and then humor can attack “from the outside,” so to speak.

Bill Maher and Jon Stewart and Lewis Black and SNL – and all court jesters – create rhetorical layers of understanding through exaggerations here and there. I’m all for it. Plant a seed.

I think we often take everything too seriously.

Performative protest that illustrates and entertains rather than sermonizes and dictates is sometimes more effective.

Billionaires for Bush
I like Billionaires for Bush, for example. And I like visual humor – there are some very intelligent and creative people doing editorial cartoons (see the blogroll under Humor).

Of course there have to be people who are able to provide the serious critiques, with all the details and proof and arguments, but these ought not to be drawn as incompatible with more humorous or entertaining approaches. They needn’t be.

They may create a resonating circuit of inquiry and reinforcement that helps to shape the milieu.

In this reality, many things happen at once. Patterns emerge. Networks intersect.