White House Lies, Damned Lies, And Infidelities: "Whatever Shall We Tell The Children?"

If the past few weeks - give or take seven years - have taught us anything, it's to yearn for the days when a president merely lied about a question that was simply NOT the business of special counsel Ken Starr or the American press corps to ask: whether he engaged in any form of adulterous sexual activity with a consenting adult.

True, it's sad as hell that the Clinton-Lewinsky cigar/blue dress debacle would seem like the good old days. Yet, back then, we weren't at war with everyone and everything, more Americans were earning a living wage while far fewer were forced into bankruptcy and home foreclosures, and Washington's only seeming grave concern was "What shall we tell the children?" about a lie that was really none of our business when, today, the people getting screwed are American workers and other citizens (and it's sure as heck not consensual!), the lies told undercut not the sanctity of marriage but the entire U.S. constitution, bill of rights, and the ever-declining integrity of a democracy.

Indeed, we really SHOULD be asking the question now, "Whatever will we tell our kids?" because, if we don't figure out how to address what the Bush Administration is doing to us and America and the world, our kids stand almost no chance whatsoever of living in a country of which they can be duly (rather than artificially) proud.

Bush: Felon In Chief

TalkLeft gives you more details about the "Karl Rove-Ken Mehlman/Official White House email sent out over Republican National Committee servers/incoming and outgoing email messages for 51 out of 87 different White House/government appointees purged" brouhaha.

Or, as Bush and Cheney (AND U.S. ASSAttorney General Alberto Gonzales) like to say,"WHAT U.S. Constitution? WHOSE Bill of Rights? WHAT planet are you on where you think this administration is accountable to anyone? The Presidential Records Act, like the Geneva Conventions, is quaint and not to be worried about. Go f*** yourself!"

Oh Those Missing - Read: Purged - Emails

Anon posting in Comments on my original post about this the other day points us both to this post at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's blog as well as the comment available below this post. Here's the main post:

LIke most observers, the editorial writers at The New York Times are finding it difficult to understand why the Bush administration and the RNC can't find all the e-mails from White House staffers. The Bush administration had a legal obligation, under the Presidential Records Act, to preserve those communications. That seems not to have been a concern:

The post-Watergate law requiring the preservation of presidential records has proved to be no match for the Bush White House’s stealthy use of back-channel e-mails via the Republican National Committee’s computer system. Congressional investigators have discovered that while 88 White House staffers had accounts over at the G.O.P. computer banks, there are no e-mail archives to be found for 51 of them.

Congress has demanded that the White House and the R.N.C. provide the full e-records as it tries to figure out the story of the political purge of United States attorneys. Claims by the White House and the R.N.C. that they’re trying their best to comply are increasingly hard to believe, and we strongly urge Congress to continue the search.

We strongly urge Congress to continue the search, too. Strongly.

Now here's the comment on online collaboration:

We disagree with the NYT emphasis on e-mails. Based on Ralston's denial, it appears there is something else going on.

Question: Karl Rove didn't discuss this claim with you?
[Ralston, response]: No.Mr. Berenson
[Ralston Counsel]. Do you want to clarify that last answer?
Ralston. I don't recall. I don't have a recollection of anyone discussing with me specifically that claim.

Ralson leaves open the possibility that the GOP and WH-EOP have an online collaborative file sharing program such as SharePoint, which integrates with MicrosoftOutlook. However, this is a third-party website, which RNC could hide, say it is not a file system they own, and avoid providing it to Congress. What review has Congress does on online collaborative file sharing programs which are not related to e-mail, but could fit nicely within Ralston's denial above?

The Department of Corrupt Incompetence Department

Not only have both George Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales completely shattered all possible records for how we define corrupt and massively partisan incompetence, they flagrantly wave their duplicitous dealings in our faces, such as when almost all official White House email goes not by government mail servers but by those of the RNC where more than 50 out of 87 Bush Administration officials have had their incoming and outgoing emails purged to be sure they did not fall into the hands of citizens via the Presidential Records Act.

Really; these folks make Nixon look like a ridiculous amateur and Watergate like a silly little dispute between three-year-olds.

From Think Progress:

House investigators have learned that the Bush administration’s use of Republican National Committee email accounts is far greater than previously disclosed — 140,216 emails sent or received by Karl Rove alone — and that the RNC has overseen “extensive destruction” of many of the emails, including all email records for 51 White House officials.

For the last several months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been “investigating whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act” by using email accounts maintained by the RNC and the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign for official White House communications. Today’s findings confirm that the accounts were used “for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.”

Bush Flips His Middle Finger Yet Again

Today, Bush is throwing a (yet another) temper tantrum, reminding the American people and their duly elected representatives on Capitol Hill, smirking at the planned no confidence vote today on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a man not even other Republicans can continue to defend.

I could be tacky and suggest the Bush Twins give their daddy a big bag of chunky pretzels for Father's Day next Sunday. But I won't.

Did You Miss The Unskilled, Unimpressive, And Certainly Skanky Monica Goodling?

Well, if you want to keep up on the latest in GonzoGate, read here. Nancy Pelosi's office blog offers video highlights.

For latecomers, GonzalesGate is the seemingly well-documented allegation that the White House forced the U.S. Department of Justice, through the corrupt actions of Karl Rove and Bush and the incompetency of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (Bush's personal attorney and not exactly Bobby Kennedy kind of material), to morph into a situation where the nation's top cops and prosecutors into a taxpayer-financed GOP hit squad.

Turning The Face Of American Justice Into A Partisan Clown Parade

Anyone who watched (or read the transcript from) today's "testimony" (what Washington calls what any of us would call a bullshit session) from former Dept of Justice White House liaison Monica Goodling, who cried "5th Amendment" (and damn, I'm not sure DoJ honchos RATE that right given how they hold our lives in their filthy talons) then ran and hid, only coming out under "limited immunity", should be far more than infuriated. [bhfrik did a good piece on this here.]

What U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the White House, particularly Karl Rove and George Bush, have done is turn the highest level of justice of our nation into no less than criminal and leans heavily toward treasonous. For if the American people cannot believe in the possibility their duly elected government will behave responsibly, then we won't be much beyond where we said the Iraqi people were under Saddam Hussein.

In this case, there was no one simple infraction. We have a huge staff hired with a heavy tilt toward a law school which is considered among the worst possible in the nation (where the fundamentalist fascist form of Christianity is what they teach rather than law), that staff administered by people with no competency and then used exclusively to suppress investigations into corrupt Republicans (lawmakers, election fraud, lobbyist payoffs, et al) while forcing investigations (even when their own people reviewed the facts and found no reason to proceed with cases) of Democrats and Democrat supporters.

If we let this slide, we say, "Fine. Turn the DoJ into another wing of the extreme fascist right. It's just dandy with me if they decide to toss up a charge on me with nothing but partisan hate to back up their claims, prosecute me, and then give me the only right of ultimate appeal being the now completely partisan Supreme Court which Bush and Rove and Cheney already rigged."

Personally, I'm not willing to say that. You? [Scary part is how many Americans are far more concerned tonight with who won American Idiot... Idol.]

Gonzo's Greaaaattt Adventure

The one glaring truth to come out of all we've seen and heard from and about U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his machinations with the Bush White House to turn federal prosecutors into the SS officers AND kangaroo partisan political party courtships is that Gonzo, much like his "bestest" pal George Bush, doesn't have a frickin' clue what his job is, cannot tell the truth even when offering countless versions of the same story.

Also like Bush, Gonzo admits no wrongdoing, uses the U.S. constitution (and other documents and provisions such as the Geneva Conventions) as toilet paper, a spitoon, and quaint and foolish items written by old men long sense dead.

Here's what The Times has to say:

There were many fascinating threads to the testimony on Tuesday by the former deputy attorney general, James Comey, who described the night in March 2004 when two top White House officials tried to pressure an ailing and hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft into endorsing President Bush’s illegal wiretapping operation.

But the really big question, an urgent avenue for investigation, is what exactly the National Security Agency was doing before that night, under Mr. Bush’s personal orders. Did Mr. Bush start by authorizing the agency to intercept domestic e-mails and telephone calls without first getting a warrant?

Mr. Bush has acknowledged authorizing surveillance without a court order of communications between people abroad and people in the United States. That alone violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Domestic spying without a warrant would be an even more grievous offense.

The question cannot be answered because Mr. Bush is hiding so much about the program. But whatever was going on, it so alarmed Mr. Comey and F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller that they sped to the hospital, roused the barely conscious Mr. Ashcroft and got him ready to fend off the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, and Mr. Bush’s counsel, Alberto Gonzales. There are clues in Mr. Comey’s testimony and in earlier testimony by Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Ashcroft’s successor, that suggest that Mr. Bush initially ordered broader surveillance than he and his aides have acknowledged.

Mr. Comey said the bizarre events in Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room were precipitated by a White House request that the Justice Department sign off on a continuation of the eavesdropping, which started in October 2001. Mr. Comey, who was acting attorney general while Mr. Ashcroft was ill, refused. Mr. Comey said his staff had reviewed the program as it was then being run and believed it was illegal.

So someone at the White House (and Americans need to know who) dispatched Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital bed. Mr. Ashcroft flatly refused to endorse the program, Mr. Comey said. Later, he said, Mr. Bush agreed to change the wiretapping in ways that enabled Justice to provide a legal rationale. Mr. Comey would not say why he opposed the original program — which remains secret — or how it was changed.

Read the rest here.

Karl Rove, GonzalesGate, And The Plot To Turn Justice Department Into Kangaroo Republican Courts

JP at Welcome to Pottersville has an excellent piece up covering many of the big - and oh so shameful, criminal, and unconstitutional let alone completely unhealthy for the America we like to believe in - issues surrounding Bush's "brain" Karl Rove, US Attorney General Alberto ("Sorry, don't ask me, ask my underlings because I gave all my power to them and cannot be held responsible for what they did.") Gonzales.

Here's a generous bit, but please, visit Pottersville to read the post in its entirety:

What kind of a country do we live in where psychopaths like Ann Coulter get free interference run for them by the FBI and the Department of Justice gets its marching orders from Karl Rove? As Blue Girl puts it in “How Very Soviet of Him?”, “What, in the name of all that is sacred and holy, motivated Karl Rove to turn the Department of Justice into the enforcement arm of the Republican National Committee?”

You have to admit that Rove has yet to exhaust his powers of breathtaking audacity in siccing Alberto’s goons on four US attorneys who’d been accused of being lax in prosecuting cases of alleged voter fraud, at least one of which (David Iglesias in New Mexico) turned out to be bogus or trumped up.

Where was Karl the Krusader when we needed him in the wake of the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections, in which massive amounts of evidence pointed to voter fraud and attempted voter fraud? Oh, right. That would’ve led the eagle-eyed hounds of the DOJ straight to Rove’s self-bugged office.

Think about it: The Department of Justice have to take its cues from a blubbery-lipped Inner Party hack like Karl fucking Rove in order to catch lazy US attorneys who couldn’t or wouldn’t prosecute ginned-up cases of voter fraud for a massive Aha! moment in time for the mid-term elections. But nary a word or an investigation into the most massive corruption of our electoral system since the good old days of Tammany Hall.

And not a single African American attorney was hired to work in the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.

Democrats and suspected Democrats were sniffed out like escaped chain gang criminals by Monica Goodling and the other legal beagles milled out of Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

And all under the dead nose of Alberto Gonzales, a man who has done for American jurisprudence what Rush Limbaugh has done for figure skating.

On Wolfowitz and Gonzales: Volunteers To "Resign" Them On The Toes Of Our Boots?

Hey, if we can get rid of the Wolfe at the World Bank and the moronic US Attorney General with just the toes of our (steel-reinforced, please!) boots, I suspect we can find thousands if not millions of volunteers.

First them, then perhaps Rove, Cheney, and Bush!

When It's Dirty, Deluded, and Downright Despicable, Safely Assume Karl Rove Did It

[Ed. note: Hmmm... rather than the much-used excuse of "the dog ate my homework", perhaps we should just all have t-shirts which read, "Karl Rove ate our democratic government (and then shat it out all over us while ordering us to smile about it)!"]

From my posting at All Things Democrat with details provided at TruthOut:

New evidence is out that Bush's "brain" (or is it balls?), Karl Rove, not only played an already documented heavy role in the firing of federal prosecutors in remote control mode from the White House to the Justice Department (at least in theory) led by U.S. Attorney General Alberto ("I lie at the pleasure of the president") Gonzales.

It looks like Rove, besides trying to hide thousands of emails send illegally from Republican National Committee (RNC) mail servers rather than official federal government ones, also coached witnesses to lie before Congress to protect Gonzo and the Bush White House.

Re: GonzoGate, President Bush Takes Another Extended Vacation From Reality

From the White House spokesweasel re: Dubya's reaction to U.S. Attorney General's downright pathetic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday (nods to Talking Point Memo):

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses. The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

"Heluva job there, Brownie... er... Jugs... er... Brownie."

Note to Bushies: Where Have All The Federal Documents Gone?

Anyone who has ever worked in any kind of office knows that documents go missing occasionally. When the "office" is the federal government, the bureaucracy alone raises the amount of missing records exponentially high.

But what we're seeing today among the Bush Administration is a not just astounding but downright frightening and yes, criminal and deliberate loss of any document, file, record, or "fact" that the Bushies don't like or want others to see. This is not just me stating this: we've been hearing this for years from citizen and taxpayer organizations, from lawyers and constitutional and federal experts, from scientists and academicians, and even from Bush supporters and righties as well as from Bush haters and lefties.

As reported last night by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown program, there are scads of cases before the courts right now that show a global-sized laundry list of documents, records, emails, and other material required by law (and in some cases, the Constitution) to be kept and maintained safely and openly by the U.S. government that have been reported "missing" from the White House and other Bush- and GOP-led organizations.

Some of these you already know about, like the "sudden" disappearance of George W. Bush's National Guard records which Bush has claimed (if only these silly documents weren't somehow eaten by the government dog) would show he faithfully fulfilled his military service since he was able to slide off from having to serve in the Vietnam War. That we have documents that show just the opposite - that Bush partied/drank/drugged his way through what little service he performed - are not supposed to be believed; no, we're supposed to believe what he (a serial liar) says about files the people on HIS watch magically "lost."

Also among the lost is much of the evidence the feds supposedly built against "terror" suspect Jose Padilla (seems like important data to lose, no?) as well as countless other never-charged detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere.

We also have many thousands of supposedly "lost" emails that reference the firing of federal prosecutors case (aka GonzalesGate or AttorneyGate or GonzoGate) with heavy White House involvement.

And I could literally go forward for the next few days just listing here the documents we "know" (because the government has claimed so) have been lost on the Bush Administration's watch.

How damned convenient. And criminal.