Finally! Someone has found a way to make the American public better appreciate Richard M. Nixon: by comparing him to the far, far, F-A-R more corrupt, destructive, and treasonous George W. Bush (the 2nd). Read all of Frank Rich here, but let me start you:
A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.For the rest.
That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in “Frost/Nixon” next Sunday while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. “Frost/Nixon,” a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?
Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella’s talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew McConaughey’s).
This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over.” This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon’s larger-than-life villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.
The rage is already omnipresent, and it’s bipartisan. The last New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” the highest figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties’ two angry bases. Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.
On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress’s failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. After it sent Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-withdrawal deadlines 10 days ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill, and not just from bloggers. John Edwards, once one of the more bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war (“I believe that the risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action,” he thundered on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally bellicose toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending the president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed “again and again” so that Mr. Bush would be forced to realize “he has no choice” but to end the war. It’s not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this feat when the president’s obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats’ lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.
Among Republicans the right’s revolt against the Bush-endorsed immigration bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from rational debate about complex policy questions to plain old nativism, reminiscent of the 19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base’s traditional gripes — knee-jerk wailing about the “tragedy” of Mary Cheney’s baby — can’t be heard above the din.
“White America is in flight” is how Pat Buchanan sounds the immigration alarm. “All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay the fine with a credit card” is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill’s punitive measures for illegal immigrants. Bill O’Reilly, while “reluctantly” supporting Mr. Bush’s plan, illustrates how immigration is “drastically” altering the country by pointing out that America is “now one-third minority.” (Do Jews make the cut?) The rupture is so deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the bill, is challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like “Fight Club.”
What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common is a conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if they don’t adhere to their bases’ strict ideological orders. “If Democrats do not stick to their guns on Iraq,” a blogger at TalkLeft.com warns, there will be “serious political consequences in 2008.” In an echo of his ideological opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the immigration bill the “Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act.”
Robb Kidd at Evolving Peace (another blog from my neck of the Vermont woods, Montpelier, still the only state capitol without a McDonald's) has a very solid piece up about the World Bank and the whole new horrific levels of corrupt behavior thanks to President Bush's appointment of neocon-man Paul "He puts the wolf in..." Wolfowitz. Wolfie, of course, was allowed to resign when indictment would be much more appropriate - and not just because Wolfie couldn't control his penis or his penis' playmate.
There seems to be a mood of ecstatic joy in regards to the downfall of Paul Wolfowitz from heading of the World Bank and while many may have noticed that Mr. Wolfowitz had been a chief architect of the Neo-Cons disastrous implantation of the war in Iraq, they now celebrate with glee his down fall with little discussion revolving around the harsh reality that he was perfect for the World Bank position.Catch the rest here.
The World Bank has nothing to do about raising the quality of living for “the undeveloped world” but for the mere purpose of creating further markets of development. While to the mere outsider the World Bank produces an imagery of wholesome concern; however that is far from the real truth of the matter. The World Bank has been a tool for venture capitalists in further procuring their desires of developing and exploiting the undeveloped world. Instead of using military force the World Bank goes into the “undeveloped world” and installs loans to spur economic development that perpetuates them into system of subservience.
On paper it sounds nice, but in reality these loans subject the population to dramatic changes to their environment and create an environment of greater poverty. In Mexico farmers were discouraged from growing corn due to the abundance of US corn and now with the greater demand for ethanol corn prices have skyrocketed and many Mexicans are left without their most basic staple for food. Mexican peasantry who had left the farms for the promises of greater economic freedom are now in a pinch since corn is no longer cheap to them. Now they are unable to support themselves and are in need of work, so left with little options the opportunities north of the border look good to them.
[Ed note: See Part I and Part II.]
Also as the holiday weekend revved came word of two Hillary Clinton books due out soon and another on the Clintons available long before the 2008 presidential election. Apparently ALL of these books "which have been touted as 'Hillary exposes".
And do you know what these scandal peddlers tell us BRAND SPANKING NEW about Bill and Hillary (which the right likes to call "Billary") Clinton? Here goes a list of items mentioned by mostly rightwing nutcases but also dim types like Chris Matthews:
That Hillary is calculating and competent. Really? Gee. How did that happen?
Oh wait... she went to good schools and was taught that critical thinking makes far more sense than "intelligent design." After all, MY GOD, what will we tell the children if they see a woman running for this nation's highest post is both calculating and competent? And remember the right's big cry during Monicagate? "What will we tell the children about blowjobs?!?
Is it much better to have a coke-addled dim bulb in the White House like Bush whose ONLY three skills are):
As for the "resurgency" of the Hillary-Only-Stood-By-Her-Man-2-Win-Votes, puh-leez! After all those millions Ken Starr wasted of OUR money while keeping our attention onto Monica Lewinsky and blowjobs and some "anatomical oddity with CLENUS' penis (noted by rocket scientist Paula Jones) while OFF Al Qaeda and clear signs of danger, do we really have to sit through this crap again?
Just as with every other American, it is no one's business what decisions and deliberations and dilemmas these two mature, intelligent people make toward the present and future of their marriage. Neither of them owe an explanation.
If anything, I'd say a lot of parties should apologize to Billary for letting them be turned into a soap opera. Then these same folks need to apologize to ALL of America for keeping its attention on Gary Condit and Clinton's penis and the West Wing creator being stopped by airport security for traveling with psychedelic mushrooms RATHER than upon clear and present dangers on the horizon as Bush took over.
This is one of those rare times when even I must admire how effectively President George W. Bush and the Pentagon/CentCom have found one major and seemingly very successful tactic for combatting the sky-high corruption in Iraq, much of it introduced by the U.S. itself (directly through war profiteers like Bush-friendly private contract companies and indirectly by the way we set up operations in the occupied Iraq.
What's the BIG secret to their success in drastically reducing reports of corrupt in Iraq?
Simple: stomp on any attempts to investigate said corruption.
Gee. Why didn't we think of this before? Silly us!
I think MoDo pegged this in her April 14th column I'm belatedly referencing: "con" in the term neocon has never meant conservative but "confidence" operators whose game is to part you from your money, your trust, your possessions, and your good sense (and many other important values). The entire column is here, but I offer a healthy snack-sized portion:
Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.See Rozius Unbound for the Rest.
But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq.
You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.
Proving he is more con than neo, he confessed that he had not been candid with his staff at the World Bank. While he was acting holier than thou, demanding incorruptibility from poor countries desperate for loans, he was enriching his girlfriend with tax-free ducats.
He has yet to admit any real mistakes with the hellish war that claimed five more American soldiers yesterday, as stunned Baghdad residents dealt with bombings of the Iraqi Parliament, where body parts flew, and of a bridge over the Tigris, where cars sank.
But he admitted Thursday that he’d made a mistake when he got his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who shares his passion for democratizing the Middle East, a raise to $193,590 — more than the taxpaying (and taxing) Condi Rice makes. No doubt it seemed like small change compared with the money pit of remaking Iraq — a task he once prophesied would be paid for with Iraqi oil money. Maybe he should have remunerated his girlfriend with Iraqi oil revenues, instead of ripping off the bank to advance his romantic agenda.
No one is satisfied with his apology. Not the World Bank employees who booed Wolfie and yelled, “Resign! Resign!” in the bank lobby.
Not Alison Cave, the chairwoman of the bank’s staff association, who said that Mr. Wolfowitz must “act honorably and resign.”
Not his girlfriend, who says she’s the suffering victim, forced by Wolfie’s arrival to be sent to the State Department (where, in a festival of nepotism, she reported to Liz Cheney).
And not his critics, who say Wolfie has been cherry-picking again, this time with his anticorruption crusade. They say he has used it to turn the bank into a tool for his unrealistic democracy campaign, which foundered in Baghdad, and for punishing countries that defy the United States.
Wolfie also alienated the bank by bringing two highhanded aides with him from Bushworld, aides who had helped him with Iraq. One was the abrasive Robin Cleveland, called Wolfie’s Rottweiler. The other was Kevin Kellems, known as Keeper of the Comb after his star turn in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” where he handed his boss a comb so Wolfie could slick it with spittle for TV. (Maybe his girlfriend didn’t get enough of a raise.) Like W., Wolfie is dangerous precisely because he’s so persuaded of his own virtue.
Just as Ms. Riza stood behind her man on the Iraq fiasco, so Meghan O’Sullivan stood behind W.
Ms. O’Sullivan, a bright and lovely 37-year-old redhead who is the deputy national security adviser, is part of the cordon of adoring and protective female staffers around the president, including Condi, Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes and Fran Townsend.
Even though her main experience was helping Paul Bremer set up the botched Iraq occupation and getting a reputation back in Washington “for not knowing how much she didn’t know,” as George Packer put it in “The Assassins’ Gate,” Ms. O’Sullivan was officially promoted nearly two years ago to be the highest-ranking White House official working exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was clear that she was out of her depth, lacking the heft to deal with the Pentagon and State Department, or the seniority to level with W. “Meghan-izing the problem” became a catch phrase in Baghdad for papering over chaos with five-point presentations.
I ask this because, not only among the crooks and liars like Alberto Gonzales we see and hear about everyday, we notice that some of the lower level Bushies are in deep doo-doo, too. For example. the head of the Smithsonian Institute has been forced to resign for some very questionable spending.
Steve at The Carpetbagger Report brings us this, by way of WaPo:
a crazy thought: replacing Alberto Gonzales with Patrick Fitzgerald. The WaPo’s Andrew Cohen writes, “Can you think of a better candidate to restore honor and integrity to the Justice Department than the man who just took on the White House, and won, with the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby? Can you think of a person more likely to erase the standing charge of cronyism that seeps through the current administration like a stink bomb?” (thanks to B.P. for the tip)It's a thought, sure.
I recommend everyone read Greg Mitchell's latest "Pressing Issues" column at Editor and Publisher because it casts light into some very dark and murky corners of the whole Iraq war and the Bush Administration's management of it:
Col. Ted Westhusing, a West Point scholar, put a bullet in his head in Iraq after reporting widespread corruption. His suicide note -- complaining about human rights abuses and other crimes -- was addressed to his two commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, now leader of the U.S. "surge" effort in Iraq. It urged them to "Reevaluate yourselves....You are not what you think you are and I know it."
As raised here, in Paul Krugman's op/ed in The Times on Monday, and throughout hundreds if not thousands of blog entries around the blogosphere, virtually no one is surprised by the revelations that Bush and his henchhog, Karl Rove, have basically used U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the entire (In)Justice Department as their personal goon squad: wiping out any federal prosecutor who would not bend to their will, who refused to "invent" indictments against Democrats (not that Dems don't engage in bad behavior, mind you, but it's clear the Bushies and Republicans were willing to resort to fiction here) or continued - damn them! - to investigate the many abuses by Republicans who took their Congressional majority as a license to loot and plunder and rape American laws, American taxpayers, and whoever else they could.
But we need not only to look long and hard at what the Bushies did with these fired federal prosecutors - and what Scooter Libby and his pals did to CIA covert operative Valerie Plame - but also beyond to the many other means and agencies have been called upon to serve the dark masters of the Bush Administration. Agencies like the IRS (whose mandate to go after ever smaller taxpayers often means creating fear in such taxpayers to speak out) and others. I suspect we'd be bowled-over by what they find even if they just rub a tiny bit at the surface. After all, the Bushies have been so certain of their "mandate" that they rarely have bothered to hide their tracks well, since they felt assured they were in control of those who would investigate.
Neat trick.
Paul Krugman - if you'll excuse the phrase (and note, I should get 10 cents royalty fee anytime anyone uses the phrase "cut to the chase - ha!) - cuts to the chase on the issue of the fired U.S. attorneys general, Karl Rove and the White House's fingerprints all over running Alberto Gonzalez' Justice Department like it was Bush's own personal goon squad* (see next post), the investigations into GOP lawmaker corruption and voting fraud the firing of the federal prosecutors was done to squelch, and much, much more.
Read it all at Rozius Unbound or satisfy yourself with this hearty byte:
Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.The rest is here.
What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an “overblown personnel matter.”
Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said.
After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation with Mr. Rove took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that’s true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds; Mr. Weh’s account of what he said sounds instead like the swaggering of a two-bit thug.
And the thuggishness seems to have gone beyond firing prosecutors who didn’t deliver the goods for the G.O.P. One of the fired prosecutors was — as he saw it — threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had “mishandled” the 2004 governor’s race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.
As I said, none of this is surprising. The Bush administration has been purging, politicizing and de-professionalizing federal agencies since the day it came to power. But in the past it was able to do its business with impunity; this time Democrats have subpoena power, and the old slime-and-defend strategy isn’t working.
You also have to wonder whether new signs that Mr. Gonzales and other administration officials are willing to cooperate with Congress reflect the verdict in the Libby trial. It probably comes as a shock to realize that even Republicans can face jail time for lying under oath.
Still, a lot of loose ends have yet to be pulled. We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases — in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.
Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. (Mr. Foggo was brought in just after the 2004 election, when, reports said, the administration was trying to purge the C.I.A. of liberals.) And she was investigating Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.
Was Ms. Lam dumped to protect corrupt Republicans? The administration says no, a denial that, in light of past experience, is worth precisely nothing. But how do Congressional investigators plan to get to the bottom of this story?
...In other words, the truth about that “overblown personnel matter” has only begun to be told. The good news is that for the first time in six years, it’s possible to hope that all the facts about a Bush administration scandal will come out in Congressional hearings — or, if necessary, in the impeachment trial of Alberto Gonzales.
Finally, someone else - and someone paid far more handsomely than yours rudely - is called the DoJ by its more appropriate nickname: the Injustice Department. Here's your twice-weekly dose of Paul Krugman, of which you can read the big snip here or go there to read it all.
For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.Find the rest here.
The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.
Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.
In fact, it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.
For now, the nation’s focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.
In the last few days we’ve also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.
The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.
Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.
How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.”
And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: “In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”
In the ongoing investigation into the Bushies' purge of U.S. Attorneys/prosecutors, most of whom have been involved in investigating corruption by mostly Republican politicians, the Justice Department admitted today that at least one, Thomas M. DiBiagio, a Maryland federal prosecutor then looking into possible financial abuses of the Republican governor, was indeed forced out.
And, though he keeps claiming he did nothing wrong, Republican Senator Pete Domenici (N.M.) has hired a big gun lawyer against charges he tried to push a federal prosecutor to bring indictments against Democrats in another probe even though the prosecutor had not yet found justification to charge anyone.
Gee, isn't it the GOPers who always say, "If (insert Democrat's name) hasn't done anything wrong, then s/he has nothing to worry about"? They're also the same people who won't allow any investigation into anything they do.
For more on the investigation into the purging of the U.S. attorneys general, see this roundup.
In this piece in the Washington Post, the analyst writer Peter Baker proclaims the Bushies are at a moment of accountability. But just calling it accountability means nothing unless some decisive action is taken, not just in light of the multiple Scooter Libby guilty verdicts in the PlameGate trial yesterday but the mountain of other lies and corrupt acts this administration has committed.
So let me turn away from the first Post piece and turn instead to Dan Froomkin's blog at WaPo which speaks more powerfully, yet will also probably be met with nothing but silence OR derision from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
It's time for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to come clean about their roles in the White House's outing of a CIA agent and the ensuing cover-up.
It's actually long past time. But with former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby's conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction yesterday, the stench of corruption has taken formal residence at the White House.
The president and vice president can pretend it's not there, and can continue to hide behind their weak and transparent excuse for not commenting on an "ongoing criminal investigation".
But the trial is over. The investigation is over. And the conviction of a liar in their midst has made it more imperative than ever that the leaders of this country fully address the American people's legitimate concerns that the lies in question were intended to hide from public view even deeper skullduggery at the highest levels of the administration.
As special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald noted in his closing arguments (see my Feb. 21 column, The Cloud Over Cheney) Libby's lies have left all sorts of issues unresolved.
Cheney was at the fevered center of the effort to discredit administration critic Joseph Wilson, which resulted in the exposure of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Indeed, Cheney was the first person to tell Libby about Plame. Cheney authored talking points that quite possibly encouraged Libby and others to mention Plame to reporters. Cheney was the only person to whom Libby confided his implausible cover story -- that he had first heard about Plame from NBC's Tim Russert. And at Cheney's request, Bush secretly declassified portions of a National Intelligence Reports so that Libby could leak them to Judith Miller of the New York Times.
The White House yesterday once again trotted out its "ongoing criminal matter" rationale. But that was never much of an excuse and at this point it is utterly pathetic. Any danger of influencing the investigation or the jury pool, to the extent that was ever a legitimate concern, is past. The chances of a retrial are almost nonexistent. In reviewing a conviction, an appellate court cannot look outside the trial record. Fitzgerald says he and his fellow prosecutors are going back to their day jobs.
And there is an enormous public-policy factor here -- something more important than the vague, theoretical possibility of influencing a fair trial. Just for example, no executive of any company would be allowed by his shareholders to remain mum on a top aide's indictment -- not to mention conviction. He'd be fired.
Why are Bush and his aides hiding behind such hollow excuses? Probably because they know that if they did talk, it might just make things worse. Arguably, they still don't think Libby did anything wrong, putting them in the awkward position of disagreeing with a federal jury's verdict. And in explaining what they say really happened, they might risk either exposing more unseemly facts or being caught in a lie.
But the main reason they are hiding behind these excuses is that they can. There's been no public cost to them from not talking.
Slate tackles the investigation into the Patriot Act revision that allowed the Bushies to purge seasoned federal prosecutors and replace them with Bush friends and patrons who are not vetted before they are named. Notice Arlen Specter there.
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