I’m sure it’s short-sighted of me, but I really don’t care who replaces him — I’m just glad to learn that, finally, at long last, Ashcroft’s outta there.
UPDATED: I was sure I had this photo somewhere, but forgot about it when I posted last night. Les reminded me. Thanks, Les.
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Yeah, the replacement would have to be awfully freaking bad to be worse than John Gestapowannabe.
I don’t know that I’d go that far in describing him, but between (a) acting quite a bit too zealously (and without restriction) on the security-vs-freedom side of the equation, (b) even so spending as much time on significantly less important tasks than the WoT (the War on Assisted Suicide? The War on Pr0n?), (c) not doing much housecleaning internally, even in the face of the failures (many of which predate his tenure) surrounding 9/11, and (d) doing a craptastic job of selling all of the above to the American people, he’s someone well worth seeing move on.
Free the Breasts of Justice!
That was one of the changes I wanted to see in the Bush lineup. Now, if they would get rid of Rumsfield and clean up the “enemy combatant” B.S. I will be much happier.
OK, they found someone awfully freaking WORSE. Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel and the guy who authored many of those memos saying that torture was just dandy, perfectly legal and not a violation of the Geneva Convention. Gestapo-wannabe Mk II. Good on all those people who voted for GWB because of his values.
Join me now in the ranks of those for whom black humor and sarcasm are the natural state. It’s the next best thing to Zen and lots cheaper than Prozac or booze.
I heard he’d resigned. First, I chortled. Then, I said, I wonder how long it’ll take Dave to post. Sure eno’.
It will be interesting to see how well Gonzales goes through the confirmation process. He was behind the 2002 memo that got around the anti-torture rules. He also worked for a law firm that represented Enron. Are you sure you still don’t care who replaces Ashcroft?
Well, if I’m going to trade some Liberty for Security, I’d like to at least get some of the latter for the former. 🙁
It will be interesting to see how the Gonzales nomination goes through the Senate. He has a long history with Bush, and Bush is famously loyal to his friends. The little NPR blurb this evening about the nomination didn’t mention Enron (and, frankly, working in a law firm that represented them does not automatically disqualify him from AG), but it did mention (without the “T” word) his association with memos suggesting it was okay to use “physical force” in conjunction with terror interrogations, and that some blamed that on the Abu Ghraib excesses.
At that, I’d rather he’d been nominated for AG than as a Justice.
Gonzales is the one who says the Geneva Convention is “quaint”.
BoingBoing cites a SFGate article which mentions that, I believe. I haven’t read it, but I believe the context was regarding the difference between the traditional military conflics which the GCs were set up to address, and the considerably messier situations related to terrorists, state-sponsored terrorist groups, etc. That may or may not make a difference.
BB also cites a Newsweek article on Gonzales, money quoting:
While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation — methods that the Red Cross concluded were “tantamount to torture.”
YMMV.
I’m not necessarily defending the position, but (a) it’s not quite the same as “torture is just dandy” and Gestapo analogies, and (b) there’s a bit of a difference between what one does (and advocates) as legal counsel/consultant to the president, and what one’s called on to do as AG.
More accurately: We’ll get as close to torture as we possibly can and still weasel out of the word ourselves (most of the time, with the odd murder by ‘forceful interrogation’ written off as the work of a few bad apples), and we’ll contract out full-on torture to third parties like Uzbekistan.
We are — America is — doing both.
No, I don’t think that they actually want to wear Gestapo uniforms, but they clearly want the full range of powers the Gestapo had available to them. The power to wave a wand and make American cits “foreign combatants”, the power to lock people up and throw away the key and never go to trial or even charges (‘disappear’ them, or, in Gestapo terms, drag them off into the night and fog), the power to invade every kind of personal record you have at will, and so on.
We are doing all that too. Not on a big scale, mostly. Yet. But I am sure that Gonzales and his boss have plans, big plans.