Speaking of Paranoia

You know how right-wingers are always going on and on about crazy things they think that liberals are up to ("death panels", etc.) whereas liberals are always going on and on about things that conservatives are actually up to? And how liberals are almost always actually right? Well on that note (h/t DougJ):

The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.

A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then-Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight reelection race in New Mexico, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias's dismissal earlier than previously known.

The disclosures mark the end of a 2 1/2 year investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, which sued to gain access to Bush White House documents in a dispute that struck at the heart of a president's executive power. House members have reserved the right to hold a public hearing this fall at which Rove, Miers, and other aides could appear.

House Judiciary Chairman John M. Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) on Tuesday characterized the role of Bush White House figures in the firing episode as improper and inappropriate.

Let's see, what did I write way back when this investigation was first launched in early 2007?

By now, it should be completely obvious to anyone without a political bent that the DOJ was blatantly politicized so as to serve the interests of the Republican Party. I predict with 100% confidence that any further revelations brought about the Congressional investigations will only provide more evidence of that fact.

I'm pretty much willing to put my predictive powers up against those of your typical right-winger just about any day.

UPDATE: This Politico headline makes things a little clearer: "Karl Rove key to New Mexico attorney firing." It also appears that the only reason we're hearing about Rove and Harriet Mier's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is because Rove apparently violated terms of an agreement with the Comm. that would keep his testimony unreleased, by downplaying his role in the firings to the media. Oops.

Legislative Update VII

Congress passed a stopgap funding measure to keep the government running a few more days after Republicans stalled the Senate vote on an omnibus spending bill.

By a 234-191 vote, the House passed and sent on to the Senate a bill that includes a provision to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms troubled homeowners' mortgages. Meanwhile, the US Senate Intelligence Committee said it will conduct a one-year review of the CIA's handling of suspected terrorists, including interrogation tactics widely seen as torture.

Last, but certainly not lease, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers are finally going to testify by the House Judiciary Committee on the politicization of the Justice Department during the Bush years.

Conyers issues second Rove subpoena

From The Hill:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has issued a second subpoena in his efforts to compel former White House adviser Karl Rove to testify before his panel.

Conyers issued the legal summons to Rove Friday demanding that he appear for a Feb. 23 hearing relating to allegations that the Bush administration improperly politicized the Justice Department.

“Like every citizen subject to compulsory process, I believe it is Mr. Rove’s obligation to appear in response to the subpoena and answer the questions he is asked or assert a valid legal privilege in response to individual questions,” Conyers wrote Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin.

Conyers is interested in knowing what role, if any, Rove played in the firings of nine U.S. attorneys and the government’s prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) on public corruption charges.

Friday’s subpoena is the latest effort to force Rove to testify before Congress. Both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees tried to compel Rove to testify last Congress, but President Bush invoked a broad executive privilege to protect his top aides from publicly appearing before the committees.

Before Bush left office he said that blanket executive privilege applies to former administration aides as well. In late January, Conyers subpoenaed Rove to appear at a Feb. 2 deposition, but that appearance was postponed to Feb. 23 so Luskin could confer with Bush lawyers.

In a Jan. 26 e-mail to the House Judiciary panel, Luskin said because Bush had only asserted executive privilege over the U.S. attorneys matter, Rove could discuss the Siegelman case. At the time, Conyers rejected that distinction.

“I do not believe it is acceptable for the committee to allow witnesses to unilaterally determine what they can and cannot testify [about] ... absent assertion of a valid privilege,” Conyers wrote Luskin.

Any bets on whether Rove testifies?

"He's Gone."

More damning excerpts from the AG report on the U.S. attorney firings:

The report depicts a steady drumbeat of pressure leading up to the 2006 elections. Republican former state senator Mickey D. Barnett e-mailed Rove in October to complain about the pace of a federal bribery probe that Iglesias's office was conducting against a Democratic rival. Barnett wrote that he had already complained to Justice Department White House liaison Monica M. Goodling and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.).

That same month, President Bush and Rove both spoke to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about rampant voter fraud in three cities, one in New Mexico, Gonzales told investigators.

In November, Domenici's chief of staff, Steven Bell, e-mailed Rove seething about voting issues in New Mexico and expressing "worry" about Iglesias. Rove advised Bell to have Domenici reach out to the attorney general. Around the same time, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty received a phone call from Miers, who passed along complaints about Iglesias that she had heard from Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.)

At a White House breakfast in mid-November, Wilson approached Rove to tell him that the U.S. attorney was a "waste of breath," according to her interview with investigators. She said Rove told her: "That decision has already been made. He's gone."

Less than three hours later, a Justice Department official forwarded a firing list to the White House Counsel's Office on which Iglesias's name appeared, giving rise to questions about how Rove learned about its contents in advance, and whether the department ultimately fired Iglesias for improper political reasons.

I think those questions are essentially answered, at least in substance. What we don't know yet is who exactly said what to whom and when:

The report is incomplete because a number of persons—members of Congress, their staffers, and particularly figures in the White House—refused to cooperate with the investigation. At the top of this list are Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. The White House and several Republican lawmakers also failed to provide investigators with documents, including documents which all acknowledge are highly relevant and are not privileged in any way. It is a fair inference in such circumstances that these documents would be harmful and that this is the reason why they have been withheld. So the first lesson to be drawn from the report is a simple one: Obstruction continues to be the order of the day.

Similarly, Mukasey’s appointment of a special prosecutor to handle the open threads of the investigation raised widespread criticism on Capitol Hill, with good reason. Mukasey could, using available Justice Department precedent and authority, have drawn upon a special prosecutor with suitable stature and experience to handle the matter. It could have been a retired federal judge or former federal prosecutor known for integrity and independence. However, Mukasey tapped a relatively inexperienced and youthful career prosecutor from Connecticut.

I'm willing to cut Mukasey slightly more slack than Scott Horton is, if only in the fact that my expectations are so low that I'm amazed that a special prosecutor is being appointed at all, even if he is relatively inexperienced and even if his initial conclusions are not due until well after election day. Eight years of criminality and incompetence will do that to you though.

UPDATE: In other DOJ related news, Murray Waas at the Atlantic Monthly is reporting that Gonzales is now telling federal investigators that President Bush personally ordered him to make the now-infamous late night visit to ailing AG John Ashcroft in an effort to obtain re-certification of the NSA surveillance program in 2004. Excerpts from Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman's new book on Cheney imply that Cheney shielded Bush from the contention in his own administration over the surveillance program, but Gonzales is telling a different story, in all likelihood because he's trying to save his own ass and make it more difficult for DOJ investigators to get to the bottom of whatever perjury he might have committed while testifying before Congress. Also, incredibly, Gonzales may have written fake notes regarding a meeting between him and Congressional leaders regarding the program, concocting Congressional acquiescence to the re-certification of the program that members of Congress who were at that meeting say they never gave. Gonzales says he was asked to draft the notes by President Bush, but it's not clear yet whether Bush asked him to draft them before or after the meeting, or after the recertification of the program (which is when Gonzales did finally get to writing them down.) As you can well imagine, the timing of the direction is crucial. Which is harder to believe; that Gonzales would lie to his President about what members of Congress said in the meeting, or that President Bush would ask him to draft some notes that would help justify the recertification, even if they weren't exactly true? If you can figure out which represents the greater extent of criminal stupidity, you're smarter than I am.

Capitol Hill Update XII

The Senate passed legislation to let the State Department settle all remaining lawsuits against Libya by U.S. terror victims but remained deadlocked over legislation to rein in excessive energy speculation (which also failed in the House).

The House passed several bills including one to help protect college students against lending abuses, enforce pay equity, require the FDA regulate tobacco, and boost veterans spending. The House Judiciary Committee also voted to cite Karl Rove for contempt of Congress.

Karl Rove coming to Texas?

Evidently he's coming to do a fund-raiser for a Republican candidate. The best way to kick his ass would be to help the Democratic candidate whip him. For details, check out Capitol Annex.

Capitol Hill Update X

Sen. Edward Kennedy, recovering from brain cancer surgery last month, got special permission to fly back to the U.S. Senate to cast the deciding vote on a bill that would cancel a schedule cut to doctors who treat Medicare patients. The House had already passed the measure, but the White House opposes it.

Unsurprisingly, the Senate followed the House in capitulating to President Bush on granting immunity to telecommunications companies who helped in the NSA's illegal spy program.

Also not surprising, Karl Rove is ignoring his subpoena and refusing to testify in front of Capitol Hill. Rove faces allegations that he influenced the prosecution of a former Democratic governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman.

Lastly, the Senate passed a "mammoth" housing rescue bill that now goes back to the House of Representatives which had passed a different version. President Bush is expected to sign the legislation.

UPDATE: Congress overrides Bush veto on Medicare legislation.

Capitol Hill Update VII

A lot of bad news for the White House this past week from Capitol Hill. Most significantly, both chambers of Congress successfully overrode President Bush's veto of a massive farm bill with new and bigger subsidies for farmers, plus more food stamps for the poor. Enough Republicans in the Senate voted with Democrats to give them a veto-proof margin on the war spending bill with unemployment and veterans' benefits added on and the House passed a veto-proof defense bill with a cut of over $700 million in missile defense and a move to review the role of foreign subsidies in a $35 billion aerial tanker deal.

Additionally, a pro forma Senate session on Friday prevented President Bush from recess-appointing several controversial nominees. The House passed a veto-proof bill authorizing the federal government to sue OPEC in US courts over alleged price fixing. And the House judiciary committee subpoenaed Karl Rove to testify about the U.S. attorneys scandal.

Siegelman Saga on 60 Minutes

I just sat down to watch the 60 Minutes segment on the prosecution of Don Siegelman that I recorded earlier tonight. If you haven't seen it, you should. I've followed the Siegelman saga via Scott Horton since early last year, and blogged about it here and there, but nothing that I've read or seen elsewhere communicated the absolute and utter stench of corruption surrounding Siegelman prosecution with as much damning power as that segment did tonight. The star of the show was former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, a Republican and lifelong friend of John McCain, who utterly condemned the prosecution of Siegelman.

The Siegelman story has been documented in incredible detail by Horton and others. But if you want the story in bold, boiled right down the meat of it, then you absolutely must watch this segment (you can watch it at here.) I can promise you it won't be the last you've heard of this story.

UPDATE: Much, much more could be said about this story. But this, from Horton's post tonight about the show, has to be read to be believed:

I am now hearing from readers all across Northern Alabama—from Decatur to Huntsville and considerably on down—that a mysterious “service interruption” blocked the broadcast of only the Siegelman segment of 60 Minutes this evening. The broadcaster is Channel 19 WHNT, which serves Northern Alabama and Southern Tennessee. This station was noteworthy for its hostility to Siegelman and support for his Republican adversary. The station ran a trailer stating “We apologize that you missed the first segment of 60 Minutes tonight featuring ‘The Prosecution of Don Siegelman.’ It was a techincal problem with CBS out of New York.” I contacted CBS News in New York and was told that “there is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama “could only have been an editorial call.”

Incredible! As if the residents of Alabama won't have heard about this story already or couldn't find out about this story some other way! But such is the utter baseness of the corruption surrounding this case, that it drives even those who were not involved in the events to depths of stupidity and incompetence.

Rove Linked to Siegelman Case

It has been widely assumed by critics of the Siegelman prosecution that Karl Rove's dark hand was present in the machinations of DOJ attorneys who tried and had the former governor of Alabama convicted on bribery charges. Now one of the lawyers who worked on the case has testified in a sworn deposition before a House committee that she was told that Rove was directly involved in the prosecution:

In a closed-door interview with committee staff, Simpson recalled how Rob Riley, current Gov. Bob Riley’s (R) son, told her about Rove’s role in a plan to prosecute Siegelman if he did not back down from contesting the 2001 gubernatorial election results that handed the office to Riley.

According to the transcript, Simpson described a 2005 conversation with Rob Riley, who told her that Rove had contacted the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice to press for further prosecution of Siegelman. She said Rob Riley also recounted how the case would be assigned to a federal judge who “hated” Siegelman and would “hang Don Siegelman.”

The Birmingham News reported Tuesday that Simpson’s latest account differs from a previous sworn statement she gave that Siegelman dropped a recount in 2002 because a supporter planted an opponent’s campaign signs at a Ku Klux Klan rally. She amended her story when discussing the matter with congressional staffers to add that Siegelman dropped his challenge of Bob Riley’s victory after learning about the campaign signs and after being promised that the federal investigation of his administration would end.

Of course, there are shenanigans at work here. The transcript of Simpson's testimony was apparently leaked by GOP staffers to a reporter in the Birmingham News, a publication that Scott Horton has repeatedly lambasted for it's pro-Republican stances and over-the-top efforts to downplay the scandal:

Early yesterday, a contact on the G.O.P. staff of the House Judiciary Committee told me that her colleagues had taken a step to attempt to pre-empt the hearings that the Committee had originally scheduled for Thursday (now postponed), at which the Siegelman prosecution will appear center stage. They were, she told me, going to use a time-honored technique: the interview transcripts would be leaked to a reporter “who can be trusted to get our message across.” That is, not a real reporter, but a partisan attack animal. I wondered for a second just who the G.O.P.’s attack dog would be. But in fact, it didn’t take much effort, since it’s been clear for many months exactly who in the press could be counted upon to present Republican Party propaganda in the guise of a news story. And then, in a matter of only a few hours, the story appeared, just where I knew it would, in the pages of the Birmingham News.

Which, predictably, spun the report in such a way as to point out alleged flaws in Simpson's testimony, as the Hill report above makes clear and as Horton explains in the post I quote from above.

If these GOP staffers were hoping to pre-empt the inevitable press attention this story would get, they failed. Here's Time on the story:

If Simpson’s version of events is accurate, it would show direct political involvement by the White House in federal prosecutions — a charge leveled by Administration critics in connection with the U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

And that indeed, is the nut of this extremely damaging allegation. And as Horton makes clear in this post, Simpson has the goods to refute claims by other participants in the sham prosecution that Rove and the White House had nothing to do with the case.

I can't summarize what this damning allegation means anymore effectively than Horton does, so here's his conclusion:

We are one step closer to understanding why Karl Rove left the White House, and perhaps also why Alberto Gonzales stepped down as attorney general. The Siegelman case is emerging, as we predicted, as the most damning exhibit yet in the story of the Bush Administration’s use of the Justice Department as a partisan political tool.

Indeed, this story appears to be slowly but inexorably climbing all the way to the top.

Political Prosecution in Alabama

I've blogged a few times about the prosecution of Democratic candidate for governer of Alabama, Don Siegelman. That blogging has almost entirely consisted of linking to Scott Horton over at Harper's, who has done more work than anyone else in uncovering the sordid links between Karl Rove, the GOP machine and the prosecutors in Siegelman's case. Via to John Cole, I see that the story has finally gotten some mainstream treatment in pages of Time magazine (and it appears 60 Minutes will be doing a show on the story as well.) According to time, they've obtained State and FBI investigatory documents that contain the testimony of Clayton Young Jr., their primary witness against Siegelman, testimony that contains extraordinary allegations of corruption involving Republican lawmakers, allegations that were completely ignored by prosecutors. So far the DOJ has refused to hand over any of these records to Democrats in Congress, and you'll see why. Here are some samples:

Young testified that he had furnished Siegelman with an all-terrain vehicle and a motorcycle, lavishing money on the Governor and his aides. But he was an equal-opportunity influence monger. Early in the investigation, in November 2001, Young announced that five years earlier, he "personally provided [Senator Jeff] Sessions with cash campaign contributions," according to an FBI memo of the interview. Prosecutors didn't follow up that surprising statement with questions, but Young volunteered more. The memo adds that "on one occasion he [Young] provided Session [sic] with $5,000 to $7,000 using two intermediaries," one of whom held a senior position with Sessions' campaign. On another occasion, the FBI records show, Young talked about providing "$10,000 to $15,000 to Session [sic]. Young had his secretaries and friends write checks to the Sessions campaign and Young reimbursed the secretaries and friends for their contributions."

If true, Young's statements describe political money laundering that would be a clear violation of federal law. In 1996, when Young said he had made the contributions, it was illegal to give a candidate more than $1,000 for a primary or general campaign. None of the individuals Young named as his intermediaries in making the donations are listed in Federal Election Commission records as contributors to Sessions' 1996 U.S. Senate race. "We have on record a $1,000 contribution from Mr. Young during the 1996 election cycle and no record of any other contribution from him," says a spokesman for Sessions.

Young also openly offered details about what he said were donations totaling between $12,000 and $15,000 to Pryor's campaign for state attorney general. Once again, Young had used the friends-and-colleagues maneuver. According to the FBI record, "Young advised that during Pryor's 1998 campaign, he contributed money through other individuals." Young named four people who "all wrote checks to Pryor's campaign and were reimbursed by Young for their contributions." At one point in the conversation, Young seemed particularly eager to tell all. "This was not just for the Governor's [Siegelman's] campaign," he told investigators. "It was also for the attorney general's campaign ... I gave you the example of five checks totaling $25,000. If I was there, I would write them out or just sign them, and they would fill in who it was to or whatever." According to Young, a top official on Pryor's campaign "would call and say, 'I need money for this, this or this,'" and Young would take care of the request.

This evidence was heard by lawyers from U.S. Attorney Canary's office, representatives of Alabama's Republican attorney general and an attorney from the Justice Department's public-integrity unit in Washington. But in an unusual exercise of prosecutorial discretion, nearly all the payments and donations went uninvestigated. And when Siegelman's defense team, which had obtained Young's statements amid tens of thousands of documents provided in discovery, raised his accusations briefly in court, a judge quickly ruled them irrelevant.

Incredible. Outrageous. There are hardly words to describe what the prosecutors did in this case. The allegations that Young made regarded crimes in violation of election law, and they dismissed them because they were inconvenient and not of interest in the persecution (no, I didn't mis-type that) of Siegelman. As to that judge? Well, Horton will tell you all about him as well. No one's hands are clean in this sordid business, and if justice is to be served, then the prosecutors involved in this case should be looking at time behind bars for their perversion and betrayal of justice.

Rove thinks Iraq won't be dominant issue in '08

Unlike most sane observers, Karl Rove doesn't think Iraq will be the big issue in the 2008 elections:

In a little noticed talk this past summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Rove predicted that Iraq is "likely not to be the dominant issue" next year, largely because he thinks the Democratic nominee may well want to tone down the issue next year.

"You don't want to to be in a place where on January 21, if you're a Democrat and you get elected, you face one of two options," Rove said, according to a transcript on the Aspen Institute website.

You bring them home precipitously and everybody, virtually everybody, agrees the country descends to chaos, and that's on your watch. Or...you keep them there in a reasonable configuration, redeployed, and in which case a large part of your party is angry with you."

Of course Rove makes this argument! Just like when he said the GOP's downfall in 2006 had to do with corruption, he has a vested interest in making people believe Iraq won't be a salient issue in next year's elections because if it is, it'll further illustrate how bad his political "strategery" for the GOP was and is.

Unfortunately, Rove isn't the only idiot with an agenda out there.

In an interview posted last week on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, of which he is now president, Haass argues that while Iraq will certainly form a backdrop to the presidential campaign, it will lose some salience as as issue next year. His basic logic: Bush has co-opted the "bring the troops home" argument with his plan to pull five combat brigades out of Iraq by next summer. While Democrats complain that will only bring troop levels down to "pre-surge" levels, Haass is suggesting, most Americans won't really care now that the trajectory is downwards.

"Even a lot of the Democrats who opposed the policy aren't calling for total withdrawal. If you deconstruct their position, a lot of them are talking about residual forces in certain places for certain missions," Haass said. "So essentially now we are talking about the pace of drawdown and the size and the role of the residual force. That to me is an "inside-the-Beltway" debate."

Just like Rove underestimates how much public opinion has turned on this war in general, Haas apparently hasn't seen the polls that show Americans weren't swayed by the Petraeus speech and think Bush's ordered troop withdrawals to be too little, too late and in no way related to "progress in Iraq." People aren't so stupid they can't recognize the difference between the type of drawdown and residual forces Democrats talk about and the 10-year-plus commitment President Bush is trying to force on the country.

And as Democrats ramp up the campaign ads, they'll understand how Republicans in Congress have continually blocked legislation to bring the troops home or even give them as much time at home as on the battlefield, no matter what their rhetoric might be on changing policy. The only way Iraq becomes less of a campaign issue is if Democrats just decided not to push for change anymore, and I don't see them doing that anytime soon.

Furthermore, it is far more likely the situation in Iraq is likely to get worse over the next year than better. So I don't see how the GOP can seriously delude themselves about this. As long as the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers of American families keep coming home in body bags in this mess of a war, I can goddamn guarantee it'll be a major issue in the coming election.

Bush v. McKinley

One interesting nugget that I got out of Josh Green's profile of Karl Rove and his legacy is the fact that Rove appeared to base his political strategy around the desire to force a "realignment" similar to the one that occurred during the era of President McKinley. Here's Rove himself, quoted in Green's article:

“Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna”—McKinley’s Rove—“is wrong,” he told Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker in early 2000. “The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing. The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.” Rove was suggesting that the electorate in 2000, as in 1896, was ripe for realignment, and implying, somewhat immodestly, that he was the guy who had figured it out. What was missing was an obvious trigger. With the economy soaring (the stock-market collapse in the spring of 2000 was still months away) and the nation at peace, there was no reason to expect that a realignment was about to happen.

Instead, Rove’s idea was to use the levers of government to create an effect that ordinarily occurs only in the most tumultuous periods in American history. He believed he could force a realignment himself through a series of far-reaching policies.

Of course, I immediately question historical claims by a political operative whose efforts have succeeded and then failed spectacularly in short order. Green himself neither critiques nor bolsters Rove's analysis, but I found myself wondering if some historian was reading Rove's parallels to the McKinley era and questioning them as well. Via Andrew Sullivan, I find that Daniel Larison thinks Rove is off-base:

Rove's first mistake was to believe that Mark Hanna had accomplished something truly significant. That the party of industry and corporations prevailed in the era of industrialisation is not the product of cunning strategy or conscious realignment--it is the result of the social and political changes that had taken place in the country that undermined the base of support for an agrarian populist candidate such as Bryan. Rove's errors were not merely political, but stemmed from a misreading of the very McKinley years he claims to admire and that he wishes to imitate.

A more compelling comparison between the GOP under Bush and an early twentieth century center-right party's fate might be the Conservative-Unionist government during the same period in Britain, which was thrown out in 1905 (and again in 1906) in a massive repudiation of the government. Like Rove's strategy, the Conservatives and Unionists had ridden the wave of jingo nationalism of the South African War in the Khaki Election, which preceded their political collapse by a mere five years. The parallels between the two parties, and between the elections of 1900 and 2002 and 1905-06 and 2006 are intriguing.

However Sullivan chose to quote an earlier paragraph in Larison's post that is a little jazzier:

There is something very strange about the people who have assembled themselves around the President over the past few years. Many of them seem to have an outsized sense of their own world-historical importance, and many of them are convinced that they have a superior understanding of the lessons of history, but their grasp of history never seems to escape the generic, the vague and the facile. Weak analogies drawn from a limited range of American references are the order of the day--today we are refighting WWII, tomorrow Iraq is like the pre-1787 Confederation and the day after Adhamiya is a new Selma.

The public in general should always be wary of historical analogies coming from the mouths of politicians and their propagandists. Frequently these politicians wish to bolster their campaigns by standing on the shoulders of giants (like Churchill) who, had they any say in the matter, might not welcome the dead weight.

Rove Out

The end of an era:

Karl Rove, the architect of President Bush's two national campaigns and his most prominent adviser through 6-1/2 tumultuous years in the White House, will resign at month's end and leave politics, a White House spokeswoman said this morning.

The White House said his departure was unrelated to the investigations.

My timing is impeccable, as I just read over the weekend Josh Green's lengthy and excellent piece on the Karl Rove in this month's Atlantic. I was going to write something about it, but Scott Horton has beat me to the punch and his thoughts are worth citing:

In the end a presidency is assessed on criteria other than the obvious ability to win elections. Even Rove understands this. “We’ve laid out an agenda, we’ve laid out a vision, and now people want to see results,” he says at a briefing at the Washington St. Regis that Green uses as an opener. That means, for a “war president,” his conduct of a war, but also his implementation of domestic policy. The mismanagement of the war will certainly tar Bush and Rove, particularly because the accounts now emerging show political know-it-alls who refused to take the advice and assessments of their generals in the field. In the post-9/11 world, a real leader would have seen the opening for bipartisanship and would have put the government on a solid foundation. However, for Karl Rove it was a tantalizing opportunity for partisanship run wild. The perfect chance to steamroller the opposition. Other political tacticians have used wars to silence and assail their domestic political opponents—indeed, the accounts of Greek antiquity are filled with such episodes—but America has had relatively little experience with this. Up to the arrival of Rove.

And so Rove may be gone, but he'll hardly be forgotten. We'll be picking over his and his master's legacy for years to come.

Senate Democrats request perjury probe for Gonzales, subpoena Rove

From the Washington Post:

Four Senate Democrats today formally asked the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales lied to Congress in his testimony about a domestic surveillance program for terrorists.

At the same time, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, issued subpoenas to White House adviser Karl Rove and one of his deputies, demanding their testimony by Aug. 2 in the panel's long-running investigation into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and the alleged politicization of the Justice Department.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a senior committee member, accused Gonzales of taking an oath, both when he assumed his current office and before each of his congressional appearances, that he has now broken through deliberately misleading testimony...

Schumer pointed to Gonzales's testimony to the panel Tuesday, when he said that a critical March 10, 2004 meeting with congressional leaders at the White House concerned intelligence activities other than the NSA's controversial warrantless surveillance program.

Several Democrats who were at that meeting have said it was about the surveillance program, and a May 2006 letter from then-Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte to Congress showed the same thing.

Gonzales testified Tuesday that the intelligence program he referred to was supported by congressional leaders in the 2004 briefing, despite resistance from senior Justice Department officials who were refusing to re-authorize the program because of concerns about its legality.

But several Democrats present have said they opposed the program and were unaware at the time that Gonzales, who was then White House counsel, and then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card, would next attempt to persuade then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to overrule his deputies. The two went to Ashcroft's hospital room, where he was recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery.

"This attorney general simply has not been straight with the Judiciary Committee," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who signed the letter to Clement along with Schumer, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)...

In expanding the U.S. attorney investigation, Leahy today issued subpoenas today to Rove and J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy political director. Both Rove and Jennings appear in Justice Department e-mails discussing various steps in the plan to fire the prosecutors.

That assertion by congressional leaders is backed up by documents and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller confirmed today "the government's terrorist surveillance program was the topic of a 2004 hospital room dispute between top Bush administration officials, contradicting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' sworn Senate testimony." Now things are getting interesting...

The Government Politicized

Via Scott Horton, here is an incredible list of the Government departments and agencies that were the beneficiaries of political briefings from Karl Rove's underlings:

The list of agencies empressed into GOP electoral politics is stunning. Here’s the Washington Post’s current tally:

State Department
Treasury Department
Agriculture Department
Interior Department
Labor Department
Department of Education
Energy Department
Commerce Department
Department of Veterans Affairs
Transportation Department
Department of Health and Human Services
Department of Housing and Urban Development
General Services Administration
Environmental Protection Agency
NASA
Small Business Administration
Office of Science and Technology Policy
Office of National Drug Control Policy
U.S. Agency for International Development
Peace Corps

That's 20 departments or agencies that were expected by Karl Rove and his minions to fall in line with the GOP's electoral goals and strategies. Were this phenomenon not documented so thoroughly by reporters and journalists like Horton, it would simply be unbelievable. There is nothing "conservative" about the subversion of government to politics. However, it appears to be a highly popular Republican approach to governance.

Political Briefings for Diplomats?

Next thing you know, we'll be hearing about briefings for park rangers and border patrol agents:

White House aides have conducted at least half a dozen political briefings for the Bush administration's top diplomats, including a PowerPoint presentation for ambassadors with senior adviser Karl Rove that named Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat in 2008 and a "general political briefing" at the Peace Corps headquarters after the 2002 midterm elections.

The briefings, mostly run by Rove's deputies at the White House political affairs office, began in early 2001 and included detailed analyses for senior officials of the political landscape surrounding critical congressional and gubernatorial races, according to documents obtained by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The documents show for the first time how the White House sought to ensure that even its appointees involved in foreign policy were kept attuned to the administration's election goals. Such briefings occurred semi-regularly over the past six years for staffers dealing with domestic policy, White House officials have previously acknowledged.

If you're wondering how diplomats are supposed to benefit from an official political briefing, welcome to the club. Especially a briefing from a White House as out of touch as this:

According to a department letter to the Senate panel, Rove explained the White House views on the electoral disaster while Sara M. Taylor, then the director of White House political affairs, showed a PowerPoint presentation that pinned most of the electoral blame on "corrupt" GOP lawmakers and "complacent incumbents." One chart in Taylor's presentation highlighted the GOP's top 36 targets among House Democrats for the 2008 election.

I'm sure more than a few diplomats were winking at each other after they heard that. The real reason Republicans fared so badly in the 2006 elections is partly because the White House has stooped to politicizing everything, from the war on down, and these briefings are emblematic of that approach. Karl Rove and President Bush have never quite seemed to grasp that if you screw up big enough and long enough, the people will vote for someone else no matter how clever your marketing approach is.

More on the Siegelman Case

Scott Horton breaks it down for you in this definitive post on the case. A few assumptions are made, but Horton isn't one to pull things out of the air (unless they're juicy and damning facts brought to him by little birds) and if only half of what he says is true, then this case is possibly the single most corrupt investigation engineered by the DOJ in Bush's time in office. And the man at the head of it all? Just guess (hint: it ain't Gonzales.)

Coincidence

Scott Horton has been doing a thoroughly excellent job covering the most incredibly suspicious prosecution of former Democratic Governor of Alabama Don Siegelman, a case that may be linked to the broader U.S. Attorneys scandal and one that Karl Rove himself seemed to have an interest in. If you don't already know about this (and you probably don't, as hardly anybody in the media has touched on the oddness of this prosecution) then I highly recommend you check out a few of Horton's posts on the topic here, as the story is only getting stranger and more suspicious by the day:

Seems that people who raise their voice in support of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman are often the victims of unfortunate accidents. Ask Dana Jill Simpson, the Rainsville Republican lawyer who notes that as soon as she told some friends that she had resolved to file an affidavit exposing what was going on in the Siegelman case, unfortunate accidents started happening. Like a fire at her home, and a brush with a motor vehicle operated by an off-duty law enforcement officer that resulted in her car being totaled. Well, maybe these were just accidents. In fact, Simpson seems convinced they were. But it’s clear that she has some vague and lingering doubts.

And then, following the sentencing phase of the Siegelman trial, his lawyer, Susan James, reports that her office was ransacked. These weren’t your ordinary vandals, it seems. They left computers, television sets, champagne and bottles of alcohol untouched. And they focused with laser-like intensity on her client files.

They probably didn’t find what they were looking for: the files relating to the Siegelman case. James, who had gone to visit her client in prison, had taken the files along with her.

Of course, this is certainly just a third-rate burglary. But somehow it starts me thinking back to another third-rate burglary that occurred 34 years ago in an apartment and office complex near the Potomac River.

Can Republicans trying to cover their tracks really be this stupid? What do you think?

Political Briefings

Par for the course:

White House officials conducted 20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity, a White House spokesman and other administration officials said yesterday.

The previously undisclosed briefings were part of what now appears to be a regular effort in which the White House sent senior political officials to brief top appointees in government agencies on which seats Republican candidates might win or lose, and how the election outcomes could affect the success of administration policies, the officials said.

Or rather, how administration policies could affect election outcomes.

It appears White House officials were not anticipating how these "informational meetings" would look in the light of day (or were not anticipating that news of such meetings would see the light of day.) Frankly I'm a little stumped that nobody of any consequence at any of these agencies had anything to say to anybody in the press about these meetings before now. One would think that it's hard to keep a secret when you pack a hundred or so people in a hall. Then again, that is somewhat more low-key than simply installing a Soviet-style "political officer" at each agency, though the latter would probably have been a more efficient approach.