Alberto’s Power Grab

The executive branch of our government has long since crossed over from brazenly illegal to just batsh*t[1] crazy. In this atmosphere, you’ve got to shout to be heard above the din of casual corruption and corrosion of all that once defined the US as a democratic power. And Mr. Gonzales is no shrinking violet. The consolidation of power under the ever more powerfully defined executive proceeds—nay, accelerates—apace under the highest-ranking cop in the land, the Attorney General. Ever since his first sneering, smirking confirmation hearing, it’s been clear that he doesn’t care one whit for the Congress. He suffered subsequent hearings, but brazenly lied—lied, not misrepresented—his way through most of them, twisting his own words around and reinventing parts of recent history out of whole cloth. He met challenges to his bizarro-world assertions with stony silence or evasion. It all worked out for him since the eminently useless Congress failed to exercise their power in any of those cases and ceded him the power he claimed, by default.

And make no mistake, it’s pure power he’s after. He sits on Bush’s coattails, happily re-interpreting the Constitution (a province formerly reserved for the judiciary) in increasingly myopic and fascist ways. His latest star turn is the rather public canning of nine attorney generals from around the country, some of whom happened to be investigating the wrongdoings of highly-placed Republican officials. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to cover such an action, in which there wasn’t even a good reason given for these 9 attorneys’ replacement with lackeys whose only clear qualification is an undying devotion to the Bush dynasty.

Nixon would have been impressed, Goebbels envious and Voltaire may even have paused in amazement for just a second. There is just really nothing you can say anymore—the time for talk is past. This wholesale dismantling of the architecture of our democracy for a fleeting moment of power can only be answered with swift and unequivocal action. Some have called for his resignation. Not enough. Tar and feather the f%#ker—as should have been done the first time he espoused his views on torture—and ride him out of town on a rail. Preferably all the way to the edge of the continental shelf (though Bermuda hardly deserves him either).

The following cartoon sums it up:

Missing John Ashcroft by Drew Sheneman

This has been the Bush administration’s modus operandi: just when you think it can’t get any worse or just when you let yourself smile just a bit at one resignation or another, BAM! … you’re back on your ass. Sure, you spent a day enjoying the replays of the awkward resignation speech of an offense to American values like Ashcroft or a war criminal like Rumsfeld, but you had to force yourself not to think about the insanely lucrative speaking/lobbying/CEO jobs waiting for these benighted public servants. A single fleeting moment of vicious joy and hope that things will now improve is all you get, because when you grab the paper the next morning, you find that, once again, this administration has managed to jam the throttle further forward and plunged the country closer to whatever mad destination haunts their fevered dreams.