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July 14, 2007
our sick countrymen
I really can't get over this video. Besides the fact that old girl looks the neocon version of a hot ghetto mess, I find her blithe misspeak about who swore an oath to mind-boggling. We're never going to get anywhere on anything - a real Mideast policy, health care, whatever - until people like Sara Taylor are out of government. I'm not suggesting a Republican-style attorney purge, but we need to make it plain to the American people that vicious little hacks like Taylor have turned the entire government into a machine with no purpose beyond the advancement of nakedly partisan aims. These people are so up front about their shit not because they're morons but because the theory that all governance is politics lies at the foundation of their world view. As Kyle Sampson testified about the US attorney purge:
"The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," Kyle Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective ... is unsuccessful." [full story]
These are the same people who don't see a need for a wall between church and state, who believe in a unitary executive whose powers far exceed any of those claimed by American presidents ever. This is all of a piece.
Although Taylor put on the frazzled, "I'm going to cry" face a bunch of times during her testimony, she isn't some unlucky, low-level twit who got in over her head, she was political director for the Bush White House, a partisan operator just like Sampson who got into government precisely to serve party and patrons to the exclusion of all else, fuck the country, Constitution, fuck you, gentle reader. This particular cancer of the soul isn't a universal property of "conservatives." Libby judge Reggie Walton is a black neocon, but he's also a professional who put his legal and Constitutional obligations over his politics in the specific instance of the Libby trial. But people like Taylor have no honor and no professionalism, they represent something altogether different and significantly more sinister. When civil servants are willing to lie to Congress, ignore subpoenas, subvert the vote, and undermine the power of judges, ALL AT THE SAME TIME, we've entered a dangerous moment where the underlying legitimacy of the American government comes in to question. Unless the Democratic congress and a Democratic presidential administration aggressively investigates the full range of these peoples' malfeasance, all bets will be off.
That means trials, impeachments, ended careers, prison terms, disgrace, real accountability. We conduct politics like a video game with no death penalty - bad, malicious or incompetent players allowed to constantly respawn and clog the server with their bullshit, the pundits and politicians who advocate things like a disastrous, illegal, immoral war allowed to walk amongst us and cash checks as if nothing happened. Real accountability also means not listening to anybody who comes at you in the next 20 years talking some shit about the time having come for healing and unity. Lincoln can call for reconstruction after destroying the Confederacy, MacArthur can talk about a higher dignity on the deck of the USS Missouri, but until the back of conservative movement is broken, until the American political landscape is remade and the Supreme Court's retaken we're looking at a long, likely never-ending conflict and almost daily with these people.
Posted by ebogjonson in politricknal sciences, on July 14, 2007 10:43 AM
Comments
ahhh... I think its bold and correct of you to assert that ALL of these "new-breed" political hacks need to be run out of Washington: but there are so many of them - and so many who have (over the course of the last 7 years) really been brainwashed into their camp - that functionally, that would mean clearing out almost every bureaucracy in DC.
Rove has been successful in changing the mind-set of the GOP: politics sincerely is the short-hand for all policy.
From Homeland Security, the FDA, the NSA, the Science Foundation, NASA, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Social Security Administration (formerly, one of the most a-political bureaucracies in American history), the FEC, the Small Business Administration, the OMB, the list goes on and on - has been accused or has admitted to lying or otherwise abdicating their constitution duties in the pursuits of political ends.
Its epidemic in this administration.
(http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002075.php)
Posted by: ProblemWithCaring at July 16, 2007 12:15 PM
Absolutely. Everything you said.
Posted by: Megan at July 16, 2007 3:37 PM
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