Predictable, Hell! Predicted!

by Rich Miles

March 30, 2007

It’s been going on for six years now. Six years and a few months, to be more precise. And until very recently, no one noticed. No one in the mainstream press said a word about it, with the exception of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich and Molly Ivins (may she rest in peace), David Sirota and Jason Solomon and Bob Herbert and the like, and everyone knows how easy it is to ignore or roll over all those leftie pundits.

So now that it’s become unmistakably visible, and the whole world is watching while it happens, those same folks in the national media (not the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, but most of the rest) are shocked! shocked!! to discover that the Bush administration has been loading the judicial system at every level they can get their grubby hands on with “loyal Bushies” – people in the legal profession who are willing to subvert the laws, the very basis of this country, for political ends. Who will choose who to prosecute and who to leave alone based on what effect those choices will have on elections, and on the “unitary executive”, and on their own personal power bases.

People like John Roberts. Samuel Alito. John Ashcroft pushed out of the AG job to make room for Alberto Gonzales – the president’s own personal lawyer, given the job of the nation’s top law enforcement official. Who didn’t see that coming?

People like Kyle Sampson, credited with coining the term “loyal Bushies”, who sees no fundamental difference between “political” and “the priorities of the president”; and Monica Goodling, a graduate of not one but TWO fundamentalist Christian colleges whose aims are to insert “biblical” law back into the law of our land, and who went from fresh out of law school to being the DOJ’s White House liaison in a scant 6 years. People like – and here’s one to think hard about – the OTHER 85 U.S. Attorneys who were NOT fired. Who were presumably “loyal enough Bushies”, partisan enough, willing enough to do as they were told not to get put on that list that Karl Rove says didn’t exist. And let’s not forget Harriet Miers, so unqualified to serve on the Supreme Court that she finally forced even Bush to face reality – and who is also the great thinker who originally wanted to fire ALL 93 of the U.S. Attorneys. John Yoo. Jay Bybee. The list is just too long of people who have subverted our system of justice in the name of a “permanent Republican majority.”

And all of this was not only predictable, it was predicted. In fact, some folks have virtually SCREAMED that our courts and prosecutors were being set up to aid Republicans politically, that if things kept on as they were there would come a day when no one with even remotely leftish political leanings could ever HOPE to get a fair shake in any federal court and not many state ones, in any matter at all. And no one listened. The High Heidyuns of the American press pooh-poohed, and said, well, Bush won and he has the right to appoint whomever he wishes to these jobs, and it was the duty of the Senate to confirm them. Or, the prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the president, and he can fire them any time he wishes for any reason. Or, this is a personnel matter, and not subject to Senate oversight. Or Clinton did it too. Or – my favorite – the slipping into the Patriot Act renewal of a small codicil that allowed all this to happen without Senate confirmation was NO BIG DEAL!!!

And that’s just what the mainstream people have been saying – the rightwing nutcases like Limbaugh and Savage and Chris Matthews and Fox Noise have been saying that the Congress has no right to question anything Bush does about anything, including sending our soldiers to war on false pretenses. So he lied us into a war that’s killed 3240+ Americans and who knows how many Iraqis – so what? Whattayou gonna do about it, you wussy Democrats? This is our country now, and you can lay down and die.

But you can’t say this wasn’t predicted. You can’t say it just sneaked up on us out of nowhere. I mean, why do you think we all, those of us in the "reality-based" world, fought so hard to defeat Bush in 04? It was because we KNEW this was coming – a dictatorship, a fascist state, a hate-filled theocracy – in short, an America we could never have imagined even a decade ago, despite the fact that its roots were well-laid by then.

So listen, wingnuts - you who think this is just fine, and what's all the leftie whining about: when they come for you, don’t cry about it to me. I knew it. 49.3% of those who voted in 2004 knew it. 50.4% of those who voted in 2000 knew it, for Christ’s sake.

Why didn’t you?