Not A Bug

by digby

Perlstein gives us a little historical perspective on Alberto Gonzales:

He wouldn’t be the first right-wing attorney general to be a sinister man willing to break the law out of a twisted means-justifies-the-ends morality. He’s not even the second. John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, boasted proudly in 1972 that “this country is going so far to the right you’re not even going to recognize it,” then did his part to make it so by helping lead the Watergate conspiracy to steal the 1972 president election as Nixon’s campaign manager. And here’s an amazing story about the nation’s next right-wing attorney general. It was told in Lou Cannon’s latest Reagan biography, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, though it’s not widely known. Reagan had a close advisor named Phil Battaglia that a cabal of Reagan’s other advisors, including chief of staff Edwin Meese, wished to get rid of. (One of the reasons they wished to get rid of him was that he was insufficiently right-wing.) They suspected he was a homosexual. So they bugged Battaglia’s hotel room in order to get the goods. They failed. But it’s astonishing to think about. This is the man Ronald Reagan made the chief law enforcement officer of the United States–where he turned out to be the subject of an investigation by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel.

Republican politicians are crooks. Always have been. Always will be. Never forget it.

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Update: Fergawdsakes. Please amend my statement to say modern Republican politicians are all crooks. (Although if you add “incompetent” you can go all the way back to harding and that’s quite an impressive run.) I stand by it. They aided and abetted and are accessories pretty much across the board. Hell, nobody even said a word when they didn’t fire Scooter Libby until the day he was indicted and they’re still defending the convicted liar. I can’t think of even one Republican since Richardson and Ruckleshaus who resigned in protest at the illegality, immorality or even the incompetence of any Republican administration in the last 30 years.(I could be wrong and if you think of some, please let me know.) It seems that rather than distance themsleves from the actual criminals in their midst, the party applauds them.

Yes, Lincoln was a great man and the first Republican president. I suspect his little contretemps back in the 60’s (the 1860s) would not make him a member in good standing of the southern dominated GOP, however. In Dixie he was for over a hundred years the most unpopular man in history. In fact, one of them killed him over it.

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