Month: May 2007

Bush’s Approval Remains Ridiculously High In Viriginia

by tristero

NY Times:

Representative Tom Davis told Mr. Bush that the president’s approval rating was at 5 percent in one section of his northern Virginia district.

So… You’re driving along the streets in Tom Davis’ district, enjoying the scenery of what I’m sure’s a lovely place – Tom’s district includes Mt. Vernon, after all. There’s an all-day Stevie Ray Vaughan festival on the radio and you – why, you’re feeling just completely safe. Traffic’s moderate, not so bad. Coming your way down the other lane are, I dunno, something like 10 cars a minute. In other words:

Five drivers are hurtling your way every ten minutes that are so batshit crazy they actually approve of George W. Bush. Five drivers every ten minutes who can’t (or won’t) meet the most basic requirements of consensual reality – such as evaluating the performance of the worst president ever, let alone agreeing to drive on the right side of road! Five drivers every ten minutes whose cognitive and moral judgment is so impaired they might create a head-on collision just for kicks.

Get it? When you actually think about what those stats mean – that people who still think well of Bush are actually behind the wheels of cars, capable of doing godknowswhat for no sane reason at all… well, all of a sudden, that 5% percent approval rate seems dangerously, unacceptably high, doesn’t it, now? And let’s not forget that nationwide, Bush is at 28% approval. Nearly 1/3 of this country – voters, anyway – think Bush is more than alright with them…

The world is a very scary place indeed.

[NOTE: Some of you may be thinking, “But look on the bright side! Five percent is mighty low, you know!” Grrr… On the internet no one knows you’re a dog. Or being sarcastic.

Some of the more musically knowledgeable amongst you may have noticed that “feeling safe” is not exactly congruent with an all-day Stevie Ray Vaughan festival, given how he died (and far too early, my God, what a great musician he was). That, of course, was purely intentional and is called “foreshadowing.” Here at Hullabaloo, it’s not exactly Proust I’ll admit, but we are trying, after all, to give you a well-wrought literary experience. Sometimes very trying. ]

Lord Of The Rings

by digby

I think Rudy Giuliani may turn out to be the sleaziest presidential candidate ever, and that includes Nixon. This is just amazing:

The greatest love affair of Rudy Giuliani’s life has become a sordid scandal.

His monogamous embrace of the Yankees as mayor was so fervent that when he tried to deliver a West Side stadium to them early in his administration, or approved a last-minute $400 million subsidy for their new Bronx stadium, New Yorkers blithely ascribed the bad deals to a heaving heart.

It turns out he also had an outstretched hand.

Sports fans grew accustomed to seeing Giuliani, in Yankee jacket and cap, within camera view of the team’s dugout at every one of the 40 postseason home games the Yankees played while he was mayor. His devotion reached such heights that at the 1995 Inner Circle press dinner, he played himself handing the city over to George Steinbrenner in a lampoon version of the Broadway musical Damn Yankees, succumbing to a scantily clad Lola who importuned him on behalf of the Boss to the tune of “Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets).” Mike Bloomberg understood years later that the song was no joke; he nixed Rudy’s stadium deal in his first weeks in office.

It is only now, however, as Giuliani campaigns for president, that we are beginning to learn that this relationship went even deeper. Giuliani has been seen on the campaign trail wearing a World Series ring, a valuable prize we never knew he had. Indeed, the Yankees have told the Voice that he has four rings, one for every world championship the Yankees won while he was mayor. Voice calls to other cities whose teams won the Series in the past decade have determined that Giuliani is the only mayor with a ring, much less four. If it sounds innocent, wait for the price tag. These are certainly no Canal Street cubic zirconia knockoffs.

They’re worth 200k and perhaps the sleaziest thing about this is that Rudy made quite a show of accusing other politicians of corruption for taking things like Broadway tickets. He even dinged his pal Kerick recently for taking similar kickbacks in a similar amount.

Read the whole story. I’m beginning to understand why, in spite of the fact that he’s not a social conservative, that he’s the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president. On the defining issues, he’s definitely one of them.

H/T to BB
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Tribal Counsel

by digby

I stumbled across this interesting break-down of religious beliefs over on BeliefNet today, which seems to me to be significant, if true. BeliefNet has broken down the religious groupings in the country into 12 religious “tribes” each held together by a common worldview. It sounds about right to me, although I’m no expert. You can read their short descriptions of each tribe here.

Here’s what I find interesting. They break down the hardcore right into three groups, the Religious Right and the Heartland Culture Warriors, which make up about 25% of the population. These are the people who vote strongly on social issues. There is another 10% who are slightly more likely to vote GOP called the Moderate Evangelicals who are social conservatives, but they claim they vote more on economic issues. That’s makes 35%. The Republican base.

But what’s interesting is that all of the other groups are either social moderates or social liberals, a majority of whom are pro-choice. More importantly, of all these other tribes, the only ones who seem to feel strongly about social issues are the Democratic seculars — the largest and fastest growing among the three hardcore tribes that make up the Democratic base.

If this tribal breakdown is correct, the Democrats are far better off standing pat on the issue of abortion instead of embarking on another quixotic attempt to capture an elusive swing voter who doesn’t exist. The only people who seem to care enough to cast their vote on it are the hardcore base of both parties and they are unpersuadable. Virtually everyone else is pro-choice and they say they care about other issues far more. (This could be the reason why even George W. Bush still speaks in code on the issue rather than coming right out and saying that he’s anti-choice.)

I think the idea that Democrats absolutely must compromise (or “soften” their stance) on abortion rights is a fallacy created by the religio-political industrial complex to raise their profile and enhance their clout. It will get them nothing but hostility from their own hardcore base who are getting restive and angry at their party’s apparent willingness to (rhetorically, at least) sell-out an issue of principle. It certainly won’t move the hardcore base of the GOP and the alleged swings aren’t voting on it.

There is much more fertile ground on economic and foreign policy, which is where the trend toward Democrats is coming from. I hope they don’t keep fighting the last war.

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The Kennedy Doctrine

by digby

Without delving into the issue too deeply (because, you know, I’m too tired) I have been struck by one aspect of Garance Franke-Ruta’s proposal to criminalize flashing on camera for 18-21 year old women. (For the best take on it, IMO, see Avedon.)

Anyway, what jumped out at me when I read Garance’s piece a few days ago was that it was the second time in the last month or so that I’ve heard the same startling rationale used in an argument about women’s rights: that some women come to regret their decisions after they make them so all women must be protected from that possibility. The earlier version of this argument, of course, was in Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in the “partial-birth” abortion case.

I realize that Franke-Ruta’s argument is based on the idea that 18-21 year olds are not mature enough to make this decision, but I’m having a hard time seeing why, if this were so, Anthony Kennedy couldn’t argue (and probably will) that they should be prohibited from having an abortion until they are 21 either. The paternalism that is strongly implied in Kennedy’s formulation is made explicit in Franke-Ruta’s, but the underlying idea is very much the same: both Kennedy and Franke-Ruta seek to save women from themselves — women whom they assume are prone to make mistakes with their bodies that they later regret. This is a very bad trend.

You don’t hear the argument being made that young males should be prohibited from joining the armed services because it might be a decision they could regret later — and I would suggest there are far more of them than young women who wish they hadn’t flashed their breasts on camera at spring break. I can only speculate as to why these paternalistic ideas always seem to cluster around women’s sexuality — Franke-Ruta even uses the very old term “scarlet letter” in her piece — but it clearly seems to have something to do with women’s agency and not men’s.

I’m not sure I believe that the problem is all that serious (there is a distinct whiff of “rock and roll is destroying America’s youth” about all this) but stipulating for the sake of argument that it is, the solution to such problems can’t be paternalistic laws designed to save 18-21 year old women from doing things they later wished they hadn’t. The list of such behavior is literally endless — lawmakers won’t have time to do anything else.

Update: Franke-Ruta wrote me an email saying that she did not actually propose to criminalize flashing for the camera and she explains this further, here. What she proposes instead is to make it illegal for them to sell those images. I don’t think that changes my point, but it is not exactly the same thing as criminalizing flashing and should not be interpreted to mean that.

Also, her proposal does not actually include 21 year olds, but rather only 18,19 and 20 year olds.

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Philip K. Dick Could Never Imagine A Time So Weird.

by tristero

On the same day that Cheney went to Iraq, the “relatively peaceful” Kurdish city of Irbil suffered a suicide truck bomb which killed 14. The article also has accounts of other horrors in Iraq. Here in the US, a former commanding general in Iraq released a hard-hitting ad that basically accuses Bush of ruining the American military due to his catastrophic leadership.

The situation is now so godawful, so completely coo-coo, and so totally out of control that future historians will shake their heads in amazement trying to figure out why, by the spring of ’07, the US politicians and the public haven’t demanded the immediate removal of the Bush administration from office and their incarceration in the Hague to stand trial.

We live in very strange times.

Lessons In BushSpeak

by tristero

An interesting range of comments to this post regarding the defeat of mandatory vaccination of young girls in Texas to prevent potential cancer later in life. Perhaps the most intriguing comments took the form of, “I’m not saying you don’t have a point that the Republican objections to it are despicable, but there are legitimate issues at stake here, for example [choose one: ungodly Big Pharma profits; influence peddling; long term side effects; a dangerously weakened FDA under Bush].”

Well, that sounds like legitimate reasoning and in normal times, surely it would be. But let’s not forget we live in the Age of Bush. True, there are sensible reasons to consider many of the objections to mandating vaccination not very compelling – for example, it does not make the slightest moral sense for young girls to be at a heightened risk of future cancer merely because Big Pharma profits obscenely [UPDATE: before you howl in rage at my cynical dismissal of dangerously rampant capitalism, see the last paragraph]. However, the clue that there really are no serious real-world problems to protecting young girls – only Republican talking points – lies in the rhetorical strucure of the objection:

“We should not and are now not going to offer the 165,000 11-year-olds in Texas up to be the study group for Merck to find out what the implications of this vaccine would be for these girls…”

Despite a pompous and clearly unnecessary precision – who knew there were 165,00 11-year-olds in Texas? And is that number relevant? Would it change anything if there were 150,00 or 200 million? – Bonnen’s comment is, by intent, such an utterly vague objection that it has no content at all. Is Bonnen referring to legitimate drug-testing issues? Or is he afraid that vaccinating young girls will turn them into sex-crazed harpies intent on corrupting the virtue of Texan manhood (such as it is)?

And in that vagueness of subject lies the clue that there are no legitimate reasons for opposing the vaccination. For if there were, there’d be no reason for him to be so vague and coy. Bonnen would have told us exactly what they were.

This rhetorical sliminess is quite typical of BushSpeak. For many of us, it was quite clear from the instant they were uttered that the famous 16 words were a bald-faced lie of monumental proportions:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It’s not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that “the Briitish government has learned.” If there was any real evidence, and if Bush had any real confidence in that evidence, I assure you there would be no qualifications. Nevertheless, the impression created – via context and sentence structure and possibly even verbal emphasis when delivered – was not that the British government reported something the US couldn’t confirm despite the obvious importance of doing so, but rather that Saddam was acquiring nuclear bombs. Notice also the utterly superfluous but rhetorically important “significant” – as if the acquisition of even a single grain of uranium by Saddam would be anything less than totally alarming to an American public that had been told to expect the next Sept 11 as a mushroom cloud. No. An honest president with legitimate concerns for America’s safety would have begun, “The US government has learned,” and then proceeded actually to spend some time describing how and what we learned. The State of the Union is exactly the place to lay out such a case, if there was any legitimacy to it.

Therefore, it was clear that no one in the Bush administration – including Bush himself, or he surely would have approved a stronger statement that was less carefully hedged – believed for a second that Saddam had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. They just wanted you to believe it, and they were prepared to lie about it. And they did. Similarly, Bonnen doesn’t really believe there are any serious and real objections to mandating a vaccination that could protect the spread of cancer, including the possibility that vaccinating these girls will lead to teenage sexual activity. Because if he did, he’d have rephrased his soundbite in order to spell out exactly what those “implications” were.

This is not to say that concerns about longterm effects aren’t important, or that Big Pharma’s greed isn’t real. Rather, what I am saying is that you can’t have a serious discussion of such concerns within the context of modern Republican rhetoric. That’s because the very structure of their objections is deliberately misleading when it’s not utterly truthless. Before a genuine exploration of the pros and cons of a mandated vaccination program can begin, you must ground that discussion in reality. But a discussion that is begun and framed in such a deliberately deceitful, amorphous, and bellicose fashion as it was by the Republican Representative from Texas can only end up the way it began: completely inane.

The Low Point

by digby

Remember this sickening display? It was the day the president and his henchmen took the constitution and tore it into little pieces. They look so happy, don’t they?

It’s time to wipe those smiles off their faces.

From Matt Stoller:

I’m told there’s an outside shot that House Democrats on the Armed Services Committee will put a restoration of habeas corpus into the Defense Department Authorization Bill being marked up tomorrow and Thursday. Apparently Chairman Skelton has the votes but there are concerns about whether to have this fight now.

Now’s the time to let them know that this is something that we elected them to get done. There’s a bit of fear that this vote could put freshmen members at risk, though I don’t really know why as the data on this isn’t compelling and the attack ads just didn’t work in 2006.

The most important members to contact are Ike Skelton, antiwar freshmen, and members of the Armed Services Committee. Pelosi and Hoyer would be good too. Each link below goes to that member’s email form, and their phone numbers are to the right. I’ve only included Democratic members of the committee since the decision on whether to make a vote will be made within the party – the full list of Armed Service members is here.

Call and ask them to restore habeas corpus and put it in the Defense Department Authorization bill. This is an especially important message to deliver to freshmen members who have the moral credibility of having been in elected in 2006 in the teeth of Republican fear-mongering.

Leadership
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (202) 225-4965
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, (202) 225-4131

Armed Services Committee Democrats
Ike Skelton, Missouri, Chairman, 202-225-2876
John Spratt, South Carolina, 202-225-5501
Solomon P. Ortiz, Texas, (202) 225-7742
Gene Taylor, Mississippi, 202 225-5772
Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii, (202) 225-2726
Marty Meehan, Massachusetts, (202) 225-3411
Silvestre Reyes, Texas, (202) 225-4831
Vic Snyder, Arkansas, 202-225-2506
Adam Smith, Washington, (202) 225-8901
Loretta Sanchez, California, 202-225-5859
Mike McIntyre, North Carolina, (202) 225-2731
Ellen O. Tauscher, California, (202) 225-1880
Robert A. Brady, Pennsylvania, (202) 225-4731
Robert Andrews, New Jersey, 202-225-6501
Susan A. Davis, California, (202) 225-2040
Rick Larsen, Washington, (202) 225-2605
Jim Cooper, Tennessee, 202-225-4311
Jim Marshall, Georgia, 202-225-4311
Madeleine Z. Bordallo, Guam, (202) 225-1188
Mark Udall, Colorado, (202) 225-2161
Dan Boren, Oklahoma, (202) 225-2701
Brad Ellsworth, Indiana, (202) 225-4636
Nancy Boyda, Kansas, (202) 225-6601
Patrick Murphy, Pennsylvania, (202) 225-4276
Hank Johnson, Georgia, (202) 225-1605
Carol Shea-Porter, New Hampshire,(202) 225-5456
Joe Courtney, Connecticut, (202) 225-2076
David Loebsack, Iowa, 202.225.6576
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York, (202) 225-5614
Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania, (202) 225-2011
Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona, (202) 225-2542
Elijah Cummings, Maryland, (202) 225-4741
Kendrick Meek, Florida, 202-225-4506
Kathy Castor, Florida, (202)225-3376

Please rip this list off and spread it far and wide.

The NY Times editorializes on this, here.

We hope habeas will be added to the bill by the committee, or that other sponsors of measures to restore the ancient right, including Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Jerrold Nadler of New York, and Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, will find ways to bring their bills to a vote.

The Democratic majority has a long list of wrongs to right from six years of Mr. Bush’s leadership. We are sympathetic to their concerns about finding a way to revive habeas corpus that won’t die in committee or be subject to a presidential veto of a larger bill. But lawmakers sometimes have to stand on principle and trust the voters to understand.

This is one of those times.

Texas Republicans: Protecting Texas Womanhood From Cancer Vaccine

by tristero

We should all thank our lucky stars for Texas Republicans. I mean, who knew pharmaceutical companies could release new medications without ever testing to see if they were safe?

The vaccine protects girls and women against strains of the sexually transmitted virus that cause most cases of cervical cancer and genital warts. Merck & Co.’s Gardasil is the only HPV vaccine on the market.

Republican Rep. Dennis Bonnen bristled at the governor’s criticism of his bill.

“We should not and are now not going to offer the 165,000 11-year-olds in Texas up to be the study group for Merck to find out what the implications of this vaccine would be for these girls,” he said.

About half of all men and women are infected with HPV at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency recommends that girls get the vaccine when they are 11 or 12 so they will have immunity before they become sexually active.

That has to be true, right? Drug companies don’t test their drugs before they’re available for public use, just like the Republican Representative said, correct?

Otherwise, Bonnen would simply be a nasty, lying, woman-hating, fear-mongering fuck who is deliberately acting to guarantee that a new generation of Texas girls grows up with a high risk of contracting an easily preventable cancer.

Of Course They Would

by digby

I wrote about this over the week-end but it’s worth mentioning again. This take on it is from James Fallows at The Atlantic:

Five and a half years ago, Thomas Wales was murdered in Seattle. He was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night.

[…]

The killing took place on October 11, 2001. If the ruins of the World Trade Center had not still been smoking at the time, and if the nation’s attention had not been completely (and naturally) riveted by that event, Tom Wales’s death would likely have become major national news. He was 49 years old, and he had spent the previous 18 years as a federal prosecutor in Seattle, mainly working on white-collar crime cases. He was gregarious, modest, humorous, charming, vigorous, very active in community efforts, widely liked and admired. A significant detail is that one of the civic causes for which Tom Wales worked was gun safety and at the time of his death was head of Washington Cease-Fire.

[…]

No one has been charged or arrested in his killing. But among the strange aspects of the case is that law enforcement officials fairly quickly began acting as if they knew exactly who they were looking for. For instance, a story last year in the Seattle Times said this about the case:

Agents have focused on a Bellevue airline pilot as their prime suspect. The pilot had been targeted by Wales in a fraud case that concluded in 2001.

Other reports over the years have emphasized that this same “prime suspect” was a gun enthusiast and zealous opponent of anyone he considered anti-gun. If – as is generally assumed – Wales was murdered for reasons related to his gun safety efforts and his past prosecutions, he would be the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.

As best I have been able to tell from a distance, through the years law-enforcement and political officials from Seattle and Washington state have frequently complained that federal officials in Washington DC were not putting enough resources or effort into the case. The same Seattle Times story mentioned above goes into one of the disagreements. Everyone on the Seattle side of the story remembers that the Department of Justice in Washington DC sent no official representative to his funeral.

Until now, the heartbreak of the Tom Wales case, and the Washington-vs-Washington disagreement over how intensively the search for his killer was being pursued, had seemed entirely separate from Seattle’s involvement in the eight-fired-attorneys matter. John McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle who was among the eight dismissed, appeared to have earned the Bush Administration’s hostility in the old-fashioned way: by not filing charges of voter fraud after an extremely close election that went the Democrats’ way. But this weekend’s story in the Washington Post, based on testimony by Alberto Gonzales’s former deputy Kyle Sampson, suggests that McKay’s problems may have begun with his determination to keep on pushing to find Tom Wales’s killer.

In my earlier post on this rather snarkily referred to that notorious quote by Wayne Lapierre that the NRA would be working out of the white house if Bush were elected. But there is another clue from that period that lends credence to the suspicions that the Bush Justice Department would refuse to put resources toward finding his killer because of Wales’ position on guns.

December 6, 2001

The Justice Department has refused to let the F.B.I. check its records to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after the Sept. 11 attacks had bought guns, F.B.I. and Justice Department officials say.

The department made the decision in October after the F.B.I. asked to examine the records it maintains on background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns in the United States.

Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the request was rejected after several senior officials decided that the law creating the background check system did not permit the use of the records to investigate individuals.

We don’t know who the senior officials were, but they weren’t members of Ashcroft’s legal staff.

July 24, 2002

Congressional testimony by Attorney General John Ashcroft last December that the F.B.I. could not legally use records of gun background checks to investigate terrorism suspects conflicted with a formal opinion by his own legal staff, a report issued yesterday by the General Accounting Office shows.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 6, Mr. Ashcroft defended his policy of refusing to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to check its records to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after Sept. 11 had bought guns. Mr. Ashcroft asserted that the law which created the National Instant Check System for gun purchases ”outlaws and bans” use in criminal investigations.

Mr. Ashcroft said the law ”indicates that the only permissible use for the National Instant Check System is to audit the maintenance of that system.”

But the General Accounting Office report contains an opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, dated Oct. 1, which seems to allow the checks under some conditions. ”We see nothing in the NICS regulations that prohibits the F.B.I. from deriving additional benefits from checking audit log records as long as one of the genuine purposes” is auditing the use of the system, the report says.

Moreover, the Office of Legal Counsel added, it was further convinced such checks were legal because the bureau of investigation had been ”using this method” all along.

The opinion was written after the bureau asked the Justice Department for permission to examine the records on background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns.

It is unclear who in the Justice Department read the opinion. But sometime in October, the department rejected the F.B.I.’s request.

We all know that they pretty much shredded every other amendment in the Bill Of Rights during that period, but even as Manhattan was still smoldering, they refused to buck the NRA and give the FBI permission to look over the firearm records. That is some powerful mojo. The NRA wouldn’t give an inch even to find terrorists in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Why would anyone think they’d be reluctant to put the screws to McKay in Washington because he kept trying to find the killer of a prosecutor who was a gun control advocate?

Of course they would. The NRA is the most powerful special interest in America and nobody is allowed to mess with their agenda. Nobody.

Update: Here are a bunch of article on the Wales case. It sure seems as if something is fishy.

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Rule ‘O Law

by digby

Glenn Greenwald notes that the neoconservatives reflexively defend their crooks, no matter what they have done:

But what has become increasingly apparent of late is that the rejection of the rule of law finds expression not only on a political level — as a license for political leaders to break the law to advance the neoconservative political agenda — but it also serves as personal immunity for individual neoconservatives who are charged with breaking the law or committing serious ethical violations.

When it comes to instances where neoconservatives stand accused of criminality and other wrongdoing, the same neoconservative movement which shrilly advocates the virtually complete abolition of limits on federal power to detain and punish people — a movement which mocks every notion of due process or restraints on federal power as terrorist-loving subversion — suddenly reverses course and begins reflexively defending the accused, complaining that they are the victims of wrongful prosecutions and overzealous government power.

Ain’t it the truth. But it isn’t just the neos. It’s the religious and the old-line establishment right too. Listening to most of the GOP presidential candidates defend that lying weasel Scooter Libby in their debate the other night was astonishing. Here’s Sam Brownback, the Christian Right candidate:

Moderator: OK, let me go to a question that’s more ephemeral and it is passing and it will decided in the next several months. We’ll go down the line again. This isn’t as much fun as cutting taxes. Do you think Scooter Libby should be pardoned.

(Unknown)[It was Brownback]: Let the legal process move forward, and I’d leave that up to President Bush. And I think he could go either way on that.

Moderator: The judge is going to rule on that case next month and decide whether he will be in prison during his appeal. Would you let it go, let him be imprisoned?

[Brownback]: At this point in time, I would leave that up to the president, if at the end of the term, he decides to let him out.

Moderator: You don’t encourage him to repeal, to…

[Brownback]: I would see willingness to go either way on that, because the underlying facts of this case are ones where there was not a law that was violated. So what they’re saying is: OK, you didn’t remember right, and that’s what you’re being prosecuted, and that was what you were guilty for. And, my goodness…

Isn’t that a stirring defense of the rule of law? It’s funny, he had a very different take on another case that hinged on lying to a grand jury about something for which there was no underlying crime:

On August 17, 1998, William Jefferson Clinton swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before a Federal grand jury of the United States. Contrary to that oath, William Jefferson Clinton willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury concerning the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee:

A. Testimony that conflicts with Ms. Lewinsky’s account of the relationship:

Ms. Lewinsky testified as to the extent of her sexual relationship with President Clinton, and her statements were corroborated by numerous individuals with whom she contemporaneously shared the details of her encounters with the President, including two professionals. Her testimony indicated direct contact by the President with certain areas of her body. The conduct described by Ms. Lewinsky clearly falls within the definition of sexual relations as President Clinton understood the term to be defined in the Paula Jones case and during his grand jury testimony.

In his prepared statement to the grand jury, President Clinton stated that the sexual encounters between he and Ms. Lewinsky ‘did not constitute sexual relations as I understood that term to be defined at my January 17th, 1998 deposition.’ President Clinton acknowledged that the type of activity described by Ms. Lewinsky constituted sexual relations as he understood the term to be defined during the Paula Jones’ deposition: ‘I understood the definition to be limited to, to physical contact with those areas of the bodies with the specific intent to arouse or gratify.’ However, during questioning under oath, President Clinton repeatedly denied engaging in the activities described by Ms. Lewinsky.

President Clinton was even asked by a grand juror whether ‘if Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area you touched [certain area of her body that falls within the definition of sexual relations as understood by the President in the Paula Jones case], would she be lying.’ President Clinton responded: ‘That is not my recollection. My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky and I’m staying on my former statement about that.’

If Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony is true, President Clinton committed perjury during his grand jury testimony. I have had the opportunity to read the portions of grand jury testimony provided by both President Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky concerning their characterizations of their sexual relations. I also had the opportunity to watch Ms. Lewinsky’s videotaped deposition in which she reaffirmed her previous grand jury testimony concerning the extent of their sexual relations. Based upon (1) the corroboration of Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony by numerous witnesses with whom she had spoken contemporaneously, (2) the detailed nature of Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony, (3) the evasiveness of President Clinton’s testimony, (4) the apparent sincerity of Ms. Lewinsky in her videotaped deposition before the Senate, and (5) the President’s refusal to be deposed by the Senate, I find that the President provided false and misleading testimony before a federal grand jury that constitutes perjury.

Now, I realize that Brownback probably belives that the “underlying crime” was “direct contact by the President with certain areas of her body with the specific intent to arouse or gratify” but that hasn’t actually been codified by law. (Yet.) In that case, he was willing to remove a duly elected president from office for failing to remember if he had touched Lewinsky’s naughty bits with an intent to gratify. Scooter Libby, on the other hand, “misrembers” under oath almost a dozen different conversations in which he publicly names an undercover CIA agent and the prosecutor has overstepped his bounds in prosecuting him. This is the level of integrity we are dealing with, even among the pious believers who run on the character platform.

But that’s not all. Among what now passes for the conservative establishment old guard, it gets even worse. (You know what’s coming, don’t you?)

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

There is no corner of the conservative movement that has any intellectual integrity left. The neocons may be on the hotseat right now because so many of their brethren have recently been proven asses. But the tribe defends Ann Coulter and Limbaugh with even more fervor. Meanwhile, they are crawling over each other to jump the good ship Codpiece after years of slavering obeisance to every puerile utterance. Let’s just say that consistency isn’t one of their strong suits either.

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