Perhaps I’m confused about something.  Bob Novak tells us that “the base” wants Bush to get rid of Gonzales and pardon Libby.  As much as loyal party men love and support Libby, they are just as embarrassed by Gonzales’ awesome political and managerial incompetence.  So you might expect that, if the Senate GOP wanted to keep faith with what “the base” thinks, the Senators voting the party line would not vote with the President and Gonzales, since they regard Gonzales as a ridiculous failure. 

Instead they would express the lack of confidence that virtually everyone has already expressed about Gonzales.  Because it is a non-binding resolution, it provides everyone with an easy, symbolic vote to demonstrate some small amount of independence from the administration.  It does not compel anyone to do anything, but makes Gonzales’ position much more difficult.  It even gives Bush a pretext for removing Gonzales.  Everybody–except Gonzales–wins, right?  Well, apparently only moderate and vulnerable Senate Republicans (a category that seems to overlap more and more all the time) saw the value in siding with the Democrats.  The Republicans who crossed over are the usual suspects of administration critics and “surge” opponents, and almost all are slated to run in 2008. 

Rather than take the opportunity to repudiate Gonzales, Mr. Bush has settled into stubborn attachment to one of his Texan hangers-on and the Senate leadership has followed his lead.  Just as he did with Rumsfeld, he will eventually yield, but not before it will be too late to do him any good.  Gonzales cannot realistically remain Attorney General until January 2009, unless Mr. Bush wants to see Justice ground to a halt or rendered fairly dysfunctional for the next year and a half, and the sooner he goes the less damage Gonzales and any hint of impropriety do to Mr. Bush’s party.  If the majority of the public comes to see the defense of Gonzales as another exercise in irresponsible and/or unethical government by Republicans, the Congressional GOP and ’08 nominee will be the ones who suffer the consequences, which are already going to be quite ugly.

[T]he cheapest date in Washington for sleazy foreign agents posing as US citizens… ~George Ajjan on Liz Cheney

George has a great post on the leader of a “Syrian” opposition group, Farid Ghadry.  The great tradition of Likudniks and neocons collaborating with Near Eastern con-men continues unbroken, and I think we can expect that tradition to continue for some time to come.

The thing you always need to remember when Democrat politicians talk is that they’re lying. ~Tom DeLay

Strong words from the ethics rules-violator and indicted corruption suspect.  I have taken DeLay’s presence at The Politico to be an indication of that operation’s biases, but I am beginning to think that only a cunning progressive strategist would bring on someone as discredited, dishonest and generally undesirable as Tom DeLay to represent the Republican or conservative side in any sort of point-counterpoint segment.  It’s like inviting Ken Lay as the spokesman for company management to a meeting about shareholders’ rights.  His every column might as well be a declaration: corrupt and indicted ex-Congressmen are the perfect representatives for the right.  That’s the impression his continued presence at Politico gives. 

The alternative explanation is that editors at The Politico think it is a good idea to associate with people indicted on corruption charges.  I believe William Jefferson might soon be looking for a writing gig–maybe Politico can team up the two of them and they can swap pointers on how to abuse the public’s trust. 

Oh, yes, DeLay goes on to say that there is no real scandal surrounding Gonzales and the USA firings, in the sense that there was nothing illegal about them.  This actually happens to be true (not that DeLay can explain why), but it also gives you a pretty good sense of how indifferent many House Republicans would probably have continued to be to any perceived or real improprieties committed by the administration had they remained in power.  The Democrats are here engaged in something called “oversight.”  We understand that this would confuse DeLay, since the Republican majority forgot how to oversee the executive branch once Mr. Bush came to power.  The Democrats may be pursuing pseudo-scandals, which would, of course, appear to put them in the exact position of the GOP majority from 1995-98 (though some of these scandals had some substance, as some of the Bush scandals have), but in the process they are also uncovering the endless depths of administration incompetence. 

That seems to be in the public interest.  It also happens to be the Democrats’ partisan interest, which is how an adversarial, divided government is supposed to work: there is supposed to be an incentive for power to check power and the vying interests of different branches and different groups to counter one another.  This hardly results in the ideal preservation from tyranny that some 18th century gentlemen hoped for, but it is certainly more desirable than having the Congress pathetically prostrating itself before the President and his ministers in all things.  I suppose it is unavoidable that members of the President’s party will whine about oversight and also unavoidable that they will become supremely self-righteous in demanding the same oversight when the other party gets the White House.  It is as predictable as it is tiresome.  I much prefer the rare few who actually think that Janet Reno and Alberto Gonzales should have never been appointed, who believe that both Libby and Clinton were guilty of breaking the law, who believe that William Jefferson and Tom DeLay are probably guilty and who believe that both Messrs. Clinton and Bush are dreadful, dishonest men who have started wars without good reason.  There are few people who believe all of these things, because party loyalty has great pull on people.  We all would like to believe that “our side” is entirely free from all serious faults, as if someone’s political leanings made him magically more or less immune to the temptations of power, but this is horribly wrong.  Indeed, it is just this sort of attitude that breeds the destructive, corrupting complacency in large sections of the public when “their” side engages in horrible behaviour that would otherwise outrage the silent collaborators among the people.  

Amusingly, DeLay compares himself to Robert Torricelli, which doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing you would want to say if you are maintaining that you are innocent of corruption charges.

Mr. Romney’s tendency to gloss over Mormonism’s history and distinctive tenets has upset some fellow Mormons. Some said they cringed when Mr. Romney said on “60 Minutes,” “I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy.”

Tom Grover, 26, a Mormon who is the host of a weekday talk show on politics on radio station KVNU here, said that while he thinks Mr. Romney has handled the scrutiny admirably, some of his callers were incensed about Mr. Romney’s repudiation of his own ancestors’ polygamy. The church outlawed the practice a century ago, but members are taught to understand that polygamy had a theological and historical context in the church, which Mr. Romney’s remark ignored.

“That really left a bad taste in people’s mouths,” Mr. Grover said. “That’s a tough thing for people to hear when their ancestors sacrificed a lot to live that life. They probably wouldn’t bring polygamy back, but they honor the place of it in church history.” ~The New York Times

Even when he’s disrespecting his own religious tradition, Romney can’t really be honest.  He can’t imagine “anything more awful than polygamy”?  Really?  Genocide, slavery, war, abortion, cannibalism, murder–these are runners-up in Romney’s mind?  Leave aside whether or not he offends Mormons by saying this–it either demonstrates a strange view of what the worst thing in the world is or it is another example of Romney’s willingness to say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get out of a tough question.  More importantly, anyone who would so readily dismiss and condemn his own church’s history for the sake of political expediency is a man who cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility.

In many ways, this is how the Senate is supposed to work–questioning the actions of the executive, especially in such critical matters as war and peace. Yet one can’t but read these transcripts and see a group of lawmakers already so burned by the experience of Vietnam that their preoccupation with avoiding a repeat experience was hampering their ability to respond to new challenges. Of course, none of them could have anticipated the stunning Israeli victory to come–or the conflict that such a win would fuel for the next four decades. However, there is a point at which oversight leads to myopia–where excessive focus on the mistakes of the past harden into a paralysis when confronted with the threats of the future. ~Ken Baer

Via Yglesias

So Mr. Baer thinks that it would have been a good idea to intervene directly in the 1967 crisis?  What exactly was myopic about the committee’s pointed questions to the Secretary of State?  

When the Senate engages in some minimal oversight after having already capitulated to an irresponsible administration in the escalation of one war, it has started down the dark path to myopic apologies for tyrannical regimes?  That’s remarkable.  One might have thought that it had been the shocking lack of oversight for most of the last four years that had landed us in the present debacle, but then one would not have the profound understanding of Ken Baer.

Baer went on to write:

But it would be a disservice to our progressive ideals if we allowed disgust with the Bush Administration to lead to a softness toward totalitarian, anti-egalitarian, atavistic regimes and movements. In this case, the ideological enemy of my political enemy is not my friend.  

Wouldn’t the “ideological enemy” of an American progressive also be someone on the American right?  Come to think of it, given the man’s economic populism and lavish promises of state subsidies to all and sundry (on which he has, of course, not delivered and which he has no effective means to deliver), arguably Ahmadinejad has more things in common with at least some progressives with respect to his own domestic policy priorities than he has sharp differences.  That would, however, remind us that Ahmadinejad was elected against the explicit wishes of the clerical establishment, which supported Rafsanjani, and that he won on a platform of Kingfish-esque demagoguery that appealed to the Iranian poor.  That would remind us that elections take place in Iran, which would in turn tend to poke holes in portrayals of the regime as a monolithic, undifferentiated mass.  None of this is to ignore the controls the regime has on these elections and the restrictions it places on who can run, nor is this an attempt to claim that Tehran is not a repressive regime.  That would be a strange thing to claim, since there obviously are political prisoners and repressive and brutal militias that enforce official codes of dress and conduct.  However, neither is Iran the uniform, fanatical, suicidal state that the administration and its supporters attempt to make it out to be.  Regimes can be brutal and nasty without being apocalyptic dangers to us and everyone else.  Typically, such regimes are surprisingly brittle and weak and are the exact opposite of the world-threatening powers jingoes describe them as being. 

We have been warned about new Hitlers a few too many times in the last fifteen years, and it doesn’t work anymore.  Here is a good antidote to the more hysterical fearmongering about the Iranians.

It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant. The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions even in instances where failure to do so could result in monetary penalties, incarceration, or worse. The Court will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries, as necessary in the interests of justice and equity, whenever similar questions arise in the cases that come before it. ~Judge Reggie Walton on the amicus brief of Bork, Dershowitz, et al.

The amicus curiae brief itself is quite amusing.  We are supposed to believe that these famous law professors bestirred themselves to express their deep, abiding concern about the constitutionality of Patrick Fitzgerald’s appointment as special counsel.  You see, even though the previous AG assigned this investigation to him and the AG could remove him at any time for any reason, these esteemed worthies thought it worth everyone’s time to query whether Fitzgerald was an “inferior officer.”  Yeah. 

Their zealous devotion to the letter of the Constitution is most impressive.  One wonders where all this zeal was hiding for the last six years.

Here is Colin Powell defending himself and the original decision to invade Iraq by invoking the 2002 NIE.  That would be the rapidly thrown-together report that Sen. Bob Graham, as Obama reminded Edwards at the recent debate, cited when giving his reasons for voting against the resolution to authorise the President to use force.  If it was possible to conclude that war was not necessary or prudent after reading the 2002 NIE, why would anyone at this late stage continue to cite as some sort of authority, as if its findings made war the obvious choice?

Whom do pro-war conservatives love more: Scooter Libby or Joe Lieberman?*  They would vote for Joementum, but is there any limit to what they would do for Scooter? 

*It’s a trick question.  The one they love the most is, of course, Dick Cheney.

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Now observers close to the campaign are revealing – with some astonishment – that donations to the campaign in recent weeks have pushed the total up to perhaps $4 or $5 million.

“That’s a huge number at this stage,” says one observer. “That starts to put him in a position where he can compete – state by state, anyway – with the major candidates.”

And this source added, “Of course, it’s hard to tell because the numbers keep changing – and thus nobody at the campaign has a firm count, at least not hour to hour. But the numbers are big. It’s definitely over three, probably over four, and if it hasn’t hit five yet, it will soon.”

At this rate, say observers, Ron Paul could have something like $10 million in his coffers inside of several months, and the total could keep growing – so long as he continues to hit on themes that Americans support – how to return the country to a true, small government, constitutional republic and how to end the war in Iraq. ~Free Market News

Via Sullivan

That’s great news.  I’m glad to say that I have contributed to his campaign.  Will the chattering classes start taking him seriously now?  I wonder if they know how.  

Defending the Constitution and opposing unnecessary wars–sounds like a winning message to me.