Shut Up and Sign the Fuckin’ Form

This Comey thing is a real jawdropper, innit. It never ceases to amaze me that every time I get numb to the iron-fisted tyrannical rule of the Bush regime, another story will leak out putting their past transgressions to shame; doing things that would make any brutal despot green with envy.

This time, in case you’re unaware, it’s a tale told by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Ashcroft was the AG, but he was in the hospital recovering from serious surgery. Comey was placed temporarily in charge of the Justice Department. Bush was running his secret domestic wiretapping program, and Comey told the White House that the program was illegal and Justice would not sign off on it. So Bush’s Chief of Staff Andy Card and then head White House council, Alberto Gonzales jumped in the Batmobile and raced over to the hospital to try to trick the drugged-up and recuperating-in-the-fucking-intensive-care-unit John Ashcroft into overriding Comey’s decision. Someone tipped Comey off and he hustled over to the hospital basically to protect Ashcroft from being browbeaten into submission by Bush’s henchmen.

The super-freaky part of the story, to me, is that Ashcroft, even through his haze of ether basically told Card and Gonzales to suck his crank and get the hell out of there - Comey is in charge. I mean, you know you got some pretty fucked up shit when Ashcroft is the hero of the story.

Of course, no one is paying much attention to this, in the same way the “liberal” media hasn’t paid much attention to any of the steps towards fascism Bush has taken over the years. But when discussing why we should be paying attention, I like Dahlia Lithwick’s take in Slate yesterday - it’s not so much about the image of Bush dispatching his goons to go and hover over a dying man’s bed as much as it is about Bush’s complete and utter contempt for the constitution and the rule of law.

The psychodrama in Ashcroft's hospital room boils down to a rift between the people at Justice (Ashcroft, Comey, and Goldsmith) who believed even the president can cross a line into lawless behavior and those who simply don't. Glenn Greenwald contends that "the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans." The Wall Street Journal insists that no law was broken because the surveillance program put the president above the law. Greenwald believes in an immutable legal architecture that binds even the president. The White House contends the president answers to nobody. There is no midpoint between these two arguments. The president is either above the law or he isn't.

As it turns out, almost everyone who espoused the latter view has fled DoJ. The most underreported moment at Comey's hearing this week was not, as the Journal claims, the Comey-Specter colloquy, but Sen. Chuck Schumer's Freudian effort to swear Comey back into office when he was supposed to be administering an oath. As Ben Wittes puts it today, "the bad guys won."

But that's not quite right. The bad guys were winning for a while because they picked the teams, set the rules, sidelined the referees, and turned off all the lights in the stadium. Congress has some work to do. It needs to drill down on what this mystery eavesdropping program was (and which worse mystery eavesdropping program it replaced) and to get to the bottom of the Yoo memos and what else they've authorized. Let's call the Comey testimony the halftime show. With the refs in and the lights finally on, this might just prove to be an interesting game after all.

I wrote about this last month asking how much longer can this go on. That was well before I knew Bush had a team of pipe-hittin’ thugs at the ready to run off and twist arms as necessary. His own imperial guard from the inner sanctum. Furthermore, consider the fact that after John Ashcroft didn’t give Bush the leeway he needed to wipe his ass with our constitution, Bush fucking fired that no-dancin’ religious Bush-freak (Ashcroft) to replace him with someone more obsequious and cocksucking (Gonzales).

Think about that! He had to fire Ashcroft because Ashcroft wasn’t into Bush enough. Is there any wonder why Bush is lovin’ on Gonzales more than ever after Al’s massive brain fart on Capitol Hill? Loyalty literally above all else. Maybe that works in your banana republics and your military juntas, but it’s no way to run a successful democracy, or frankly any nation as large and as complicated as ours. And it shows, don’t it…