Resign, Indeed! The attempt by the Bush Administration to turn the United States into a dictatorship continues unabated, tho Americans don't want to believe any such goal is in the minds of the people they elected.
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The Republican Party is split right down the middle by this behavior, as some Republicans in Congress — finally — realize that a will to cow Congress (especially appropriate for the cowboy in the White House) is behind the attempts by the Bushites to assert the right of an Imperial Presidency to invade the offices of any member of Congress and haul away any and every piece of paper and computer file there, to be inspected by the Presidency for any reason the Presidency might desire.
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Congress realizes that this is not about one Congressman who may be a dirty crook. It is about the right of the Presidency to control every aspect of government — and society: you and me.
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So Congress has united to demand that the Presidency unhand the records seized. There are other ways of dealing with crooked Congressman, and those ways have sufficed for the entire history of this Republic, until now, in the age of the Bushite will to exterminate democracy and replace it with dictatorship by a tiny cabal within the approved Republican Party. Dennis Hastert and other Republican Members of Congress are not part of that approved group.

Until last Saturday night, no such warrant had ever been used to search a lawmaker's office in the 219-year history of the Congress. FBI agents carted away records in their pursuit of evidence that Jefferson accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping set up business deals in Africa.

The chief lackeys of the cabal who were induced to conduct this outrageous violation of the rights of Congressmen have pretended indignation so great that they threaten to resign if Congress insists that the papers and COMPUTER seized be returned.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, were said to be ready to quit if the Justice Department was asked to return the Jefferson documents, the senior administration official said on condition of anonymity. The resignation of FBI Director Robert Mueller also was implied, the official said.

By all means, resign, you dirty, un-American bastards!
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If Members of Congress aren't safe from violations of their most basic rights, from Presidential seizure of their most private records of every conceivable sort, then who of us in the Nation overall, can ever be safe?
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We are perilously close to Presidential dictatorship. But you wouldn't know it from public reaction to this horrendous attack upon Congress by the Imperial Presidency — which might have to be renamed "Dictatorial Presidency".
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Commentators from the Radical Right that wants a Presidential dictatorship — as long as the President is a Radical Right Republican, that is; they sure wouldn't want a Democratic Liberal dictator! — are pretending that there is no issue of Congressional privilege nor of the equality of the various branches of government involved here. But what if things were reversed?
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What if Congress sent in its own agents to seize the President's computer and ransack the President's most private files? Would the President consent to that? Or would he assert Presidential privilege against invasion of Presidential perquisites by an Imperial Congress?
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You can bet your entire life savings, and every cent you will ever make from every source, that the Presidency would never permit Congress to assert the right to seize Presidential papers and computers for suchever purpose it might claim, be it corruption or any other excuse. Rather, the Presidency — any Presidency — would assert that Congress is attempting to violate the rights of the Presidency and change this country in a fundamental way, away from a government of separate and equal branches to a Congressional Dictatorship in which the Presidency can never act without expecting that everything it does will be examined in detail by Congress, a Congress that is entitled at any time to seize every paper document and computer file on every Presidential computer in the world to root out anything it objects to.
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And what of the Supreme Court? Would either the Presidency or Congress dare to seize the computers and ransack the files, in the office or home, of any Supreme Court 'Justice'?
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Talk about "chill"! "Chill" refers to the inhibition of any activity by the expectation that one's actions will be investigated and possibly punished by Government — or, in this case, by one part of Government against another.
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How is Congress to do its work if everything its members are thinking can be examined by the Presidency? What about confidential communications between a Member of Congress and a constituent, or even emails between a Congressman and his lawyer! Is the FBI really going to skip over every email between Congressman Jefferson and his lawyers? Or is it going to read every word?
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How is the Presidency to do its work if everything that every member of the Executive Branch does can be examined by Congress? Does the White House really want Congress looking thru everything on Vice President Cheney's various computers? What is on Alberto Gonzales's computers (office and home, desktop and laptop)? Would he be perfectly content to have every single member of Congress read thru every file there? I suspect he would not.
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The people of the United States should, with one voice, shout to Alberto Gonzales, "By all means resign, you piece of sh*t bastard! And take every other would-be dictator with you."
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This is not Latin America, and we don't have 'Presidents for Life'. Yet.
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That would, however, seem to be the aspiration of the Republican Right: that George Bush, that pliant, stupid puppet of a Rightwing cabal, remain in office to the end of his days.
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Of course, all free peoples do have one last remedy against dictatorship: the gun. And there are said to be 200 million guns in this country. At end, we may have to shoot every single member of the cabal that is trying — very, very hard, consistently in many arenas at once — to turn this country (and then the world) into a dictatorship.
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If you don't feel threatened, you're not paying attention.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,464.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:53 AM