Bush officials insist that they were acting under the guidance of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises Presidents on the scope of their constitutional powers. For the OPR report to conclude that Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury violated their professional duties as lawyers and, in effect, gave Bush pre-cooked legal opinions to do what he already wanted to do would shatter that line of defense.
Shatter away. Those whores belong in the juzgado with their pimps. The term 'jailhouse lawyer' may take on a whole new meaning when the jailhouse is fulla Bush & Cheney lawyers.
In the juzgado vein, there's a coupla short paragraphs at the end about Judge Baltasar Garzon, my new hero.
That article was basically about high-power lawyers slingin' bullshit boilerplate on request and perhaps beginning to regret it, but it led me to an article that I had missed earlier in the month, a 'recommended read' by Robert Parry.
Earlier this decade when some of us warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.
I have been called many things, but I am positively proud to claim the title of anti-Bush regime 'less printable epithet'!
The only real problem with being called names by the Repugs is that they're basically cowards and won't do it to your face where you can, er, counsel them on the error of their ways, perhaps with a 'moment of prayer', where they do all the prayin' that you'll stop counsellin' 'em. Heh. But I digress...
According to his administration's secret legal memos released Monday, Bush could waive all meaningful constitutional rights of citizens, including the First Amendment’s protections on free speech and a free press.
What was particularly stunning about Yoo’s reference to waiving the First Amendment – a pillar of American democracy – was his cavalier attitude. He tossed the paragraph into a memo focused on stripping Americans of their Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
I think the legal term for that sort of inclusion is 'the fine print', like in a used-car 'guarantee'. You'll never see it until the damn thing breaks and you want it fixed and they call your attention to the part that says 'fuck you'.
The significance of Yoo’s throwaway paragraph about throwing away the First Amendment is that it suggests that the Bush administration intended as early as October 2001 to act against journalists and citizens who were viewed as undermining Bush’s “war on terror” through public comments or disclosures.
So, a seemingly incongruous reference to overriding the First Amendment – in a memo centered on overriding the Fourth Amendment – could be explained by the desire of White House officials to have some legal cover for actions aimed at journalists who were exposing secrets or whose reporting might weaken the national resolve behind Bush’s actions.
A free press is not in the best interests of the vast right-wing conspiracy against this country. They've actually pretty much eliminated it anyway by buying it up. Freedom of the press is for those who own a press. Freedom of speech is damn hard to kill, though, thank you Founding Fathers, but they keep trying.
Here's the last line and the money shot:
In other words, Bush’s assault on America’s constitutional Republic may have been more aggressive than many of us imagined. It was a bullet that came close to the heart of a dream dating back to 1776.
We may never know exactly how close we came. Bush doesn't have the brain power to come up with any of this himself, but Cheney sure as shit does. That the dictatorship did not get as far as it might have may be because widespread dissent, sadly missing for most of The Bush Years, did not get dangerous enough for them to implement it, but given the distancing of Bush from Cheney during the last coupla years of his fake presidency, it may have dawned on Bush in that dim bulb of a brain of his that The Dick had led him down the garden path to being The Worst President We've Ever Had, destroyed his chances at any kind of good historical legacy, realized that he, George W. Favored Son, was in fact the titular president who would be the one who was going to, is going to, catch all the heat, and may in fact have been installed as a patsy simply to take the rap for the (now, luckily) failed neocon agenda in the first place, further realized that the greatness he had been promised for going along was a scam on him from the gate, and simply put his foot down.
Even after the truth about Cheney and the neocons really, really comes out, and it will, and by that I mean that the general public accepts and understands what they tried to do, Bush's name was on the door and he is most certainly to blame for the disaster of his eight years, but it pains me to think that the puppet Bush may be due partial credit for not letting Cheney and the neocons complete their coup d'etat.
Two things happened in that post:
1) My stream-of-unconsciousness 'style' may have spewed out the longest, most convoluted sentence of my career, and
2) I eased my metaphorical foot off Bush's metaphorical neck for a second. I must be going soft in my old age. Or maybe after 4½ years of blogging against him it was just time to change my socks.
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