The Radical Cure
by David Essex

All recent Republican administrations, four out of four including Richard Nixon's, have ended under penumbra of impeachable offenses, the reckonings for which have been postponed and then derailed by effective cover-up, by orchestrated perjuries sealed forever with Presidential pardons. Now the Scooter Libby verdict, the Gonzales affair, and doubtless much, much more to come, make it all but certain we'll go five for five — that the second Bush administration will end, as did the first, with the Presidential pardon of a co-conspirator. History repeats itself — somewhere between farce and atrocity — and the clear cause is the consistent failure to impeach and prosecute criminal Republicans.

The case of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, has served as a window into the Bush administration and an encapsulation of its standard operational ethic. A few months prior to the 2004 elections Libby and Karl Rove participated in an orchestrated smear campaign against Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who'd had the audacity to debunk some of the mendacious sales pitch for the invasion of Iraq. The arm-chair warriors of the White House rather tellingly concocted a tale about how Wilson (decorated for heroism in Iraq by Bush I) was the kind of girly-man whose wife has to find jobs for him. Unfortunately for Scooter et al., said wife was an operative in the WMD division of the CIA, and the smear blew her cover. Soon Bush needed a firewall between him and the scandal, so, breaking his own world record for on-camera phoniness, he promised to "investigate" the leak and moved on. There's no conceivable universe wherein W's own chief of staff, Rove would have joined the scheme without the snickering approval of his nominal boss, so it's hardly surprising that Bush's White House has done absolutely no investigation of itself, to this day.

After Bush's OJ-like promise to solve the crime, Libby and Rove denied everything for long enough to get their boss re-elected. Then at the last minute, Karl Rove apparently turned state's evidence, so only Libby was charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. Well before Libby's recent conviction, right-wingers started calling for a pardon, bizarrely claiming that since Valerie Plame wasn't under cover, there was "no underlying crime" to justify the investigation Scooter had lied to. As of March 16, we know from the Bush's own CIA chief that Valerie Plame was under cover. This has prompted some Republicans to invoke the "Was Not Was Not Was Not" defense, but experts say that Libby has a poor chance for a new trial, and a very weak appeal, so it is highly likely he'll be pardoned well before the prospect of prison tempts him to turn on his former bosses.

The nation would have a lot less hard evidence about Bush administration lies if not for the heroic efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the Chicago US Attorney who got tapped as special prosecutor. Undoubtedly Fitzgerald's efforts helped convince Karl Rove that he needed to have some US Attorneys fired, especially after the Democrats' recent electoral victories — hence the ongoing Gonzales affair. Plamegate might have been a matter of arrogant blundering, mere criminal negligence. It may also have been a deliberate signal to other WMD experts that they would be, in Rove's phrase, "fucked like they've never been fucked" if they talked about the "fixed intelligence." But the current uproar over the firing of eight US attorneys last December clearly points to systemic corruption in the Bush administration and, not coincidentally, to Karl Rove's well-established historical MO.

The Prosecutor Purge lacks any atomic bombs or gorgeous blonde spies, but still it's a story that will be with us for awhile. In the wake of Plamegate and the Libby trial it's now a matter of public record that lying and even perjury are SOP at the White House. Under these circumstances Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should not have told the Senate Judiciary committee under oath, "I think I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons..." and "I am fully committed, as the administration's fully committed, to ensure that, with respect to every United States attorney position in this country, we will have a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed United States attorney," and that the prosecutors he fired were "underperforming" — especially when these public claims were (to a ridiculous degree) diametrically contradicted by his chief of staff's e-mails. Even a C-minus lawyer like Gonzales should know it's illegal to lie to Congress.

As usual with the "loyal Bushies," the lies were cover-up for greater illegality, and that is ongoing conversion of the Justice Department to Justice Department to Karl Rove's "ratfucking" operation. As John DiIulio said in 2002, shortly after fleeing the administration in fear for his soul:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Karl Rove very soon frightened DiIulio into apologizing for this observation, perhaps underscoring its absolute veracity, which has since has been borne out again and again. Now blatant corruption of the Justice Department is its quintessential evidence. At the "Justice" Department this politicizing seems to have manufactured investigations into Democratic operations and impeded investigations into Republican — thus a comprehensive study by John Kragan and Donald Shields reveals that "...across the nation from 2001 through 2006 the Bush Justice Department investigated Democratic office holders and candidates at a rate more than four times greater (nearly 80 percent to 18 percent) than they investigated Republican office holders and seekers." Not coincidentally, the US attorneys fired last December were notably uncooperative in the framing of Democrats, or else they prosecuted Republicans.

As Sidney Blumenthal recently pointed out in Salon, Karl Rove has long exploited such investigations into his political opponents:

From the earliest Republican campaigns that Rove ran in Texas, beginning in 1986, the FBI was involved in investigating every one of his candidates' Democratic opponents. Rove happened to have a close and mysterious relationship with the chief of the FBI office in Austin. Investigations were announced as elections grew close, but there were rarely indictments, just tainted Democrats and victorious Republicans.

In light of this, things such as the US attorney's odd October intrusion into the dead-heat New Jersey Senate race seem extremely suspicious. One might also fairly wonder whether Rove wanted to have his former aide Tim Griffin made US attorney in Little Rock, despite his lack of legal experience, so that he might make trouble for Hillary Clinton, should she be the Democratic presidential candidate. Senate Democrats apparently want to ask Rove about such things, but his boss says he can answer their questions only if free to lie with impunity, that is, off the record and un-sworn.

Dirty politics is, of course, not the only reason the Bush administration needs compliant prosecutors. As often happens, this organization takes its style directly from the top, and George W. Bush came to the White House with a rich history of personal dishonesty and grossly unethical behavior, up to and including corporate crime. He also brought a remarkable affinity for criminals such as Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff, and Bernie Kerick. We may safely speculate that some criminals joined the administration (like procurement chief David Savafian, now in prison) and many, many others profited from it, including energy executives and defense contractors who got huge no-bid contracts for their shadowy "services" in the Global War on Terror and Iraq: Halliburton, Carlyle Group, SAIC, Blackwater, et cetera. Should anyone ever care to devote the investigatory resources to Bushie ethics that went into say, the years-long Whitewater fizzle, it's a safe bet they will uncover a top-to-bottom kleptocracy bold enough to make Caligula envious. But just to provide a cinematic visual aid for this speculation: consider the recent revelation that the administration loaded 12 billion dollars mostly, in $100 bills, onto pallets (that's 336 tons of scrip!) and then onto cargo planes, and flew it into the fog of the Iraq war — where about 250 of those tons, or $8.8 billion, completely disappeared. Paranoids might want some assurance that this cash hasn't been cycled back to fund Republican campaigns and Rove's dirty-tricks squads into the next millennium.

Toxic as an Obstruction of Justice Department might be for a democracy, and promising as it might be as an avenue towards further investigation and prosecution, the purge of prosecutors is relatively trivial when compared to the many other high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration. Last winter New Mexico Democrats drafted a resolution petitioning Congress to investigate and impeach Bush and Cheney, and that document provides a good bill of particulars. It charges that the Bush and Cheney: "conspired with other to defraud the United Sates" by misleading us into the Iraq war; that Bush ordered the NSA to conduct illegal, warrantless surveillance of American citizens; that they "conspired to commit the torture of prisoners" in violation of law and treaty; and that in the matter of so-called enemy combatants "they acted to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights by ordering indefinite detention without access to legal counsel." This resolution was mysteriously killed when nine Democratic state senators joined with Republicans to kill the bill without a reading. But why? The charges in it are hardly even controversial. Certainly Bush wouldn't cop to lying us into the war (now matter how indisputable the evidence), but apart from that he doesn't even deny the practices cited; rather he and his attorneys assert a presidential right to do all the other things, and a good many more besides.

In the hundreds of signing statements and constitutional challenges he has appended to the acts of Congress. Bush has insisted that as Decider, he can ignore, modify or enforce the law as he sees fit. The paradigm case is the signing statement appended to the excruciatingly negotiated and much ballyhooed ban on torture. Bush signed the bill, which passed with veto-proof margins, but he mysteriously did so at 8 PM on December 30, and he appended this:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

In plain English this means: "I claim the right to ignore this law entirely." Many, including (as Bush doubtless intended) some at Guantanamo, saw this as an "as you were" to his torturers, an assertion that neither Congress nor the judiciary has the power to make them stop, if Bush doesn't want them to. In fact, Bush has similarly asserted the primacy of the "unitary executive" over the other branches of government at least 82 times. His power grab is a classic instance of an unbelievable truth, a brute fact that outstrips the average capacity to comprehend it: the President can, without any legal process, have his uniformed subordinates remove anyone to an undisclosed location and there held indefinitely and tortured, if, in his entirely private or even top-secret view, this would somehow deter hypothetical "terrorist attacks." We have abundant, clear evidence of this policy in practice, in the years-long incommunicado detention of an Amercian citizen, Josè Padilla, once, though no longer, accused of planning a "dirty bomb." We get a sense of torture's efficacy from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's recent Gitmo confessions to everything, and the collective skepticism with which these effusions were greeted around the world.

If Bush had declared that The War required martial law, and that he must therefore dissolve Congress and the Courts, those Americans who aren't inFoxicated unto delusion would object violently. But he has accomplished the same thing by invariably holding the "unitary executive" above the law, holding that he is able to jail whom he chooses, how he chooses, to make war at will, and is answerable to nobody. If under Nixon, there was famously a "cancer on the Presidency" that cancer has clearly metastasized. And yet talk of impeachment is regarded as somehow radical. Given all of the above, one should wonder, what would it take for a viable impeachment? Must there be Presidential rape rooms or death camps — on video? Must citizens be nerve-gassed before regime change is considered, and if so will such administrative remedy even be then available?

Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff, captured in an email the essence of the Bush lame-duck defense strategy, "We should gum this to death... ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations... and otherwise run out the clock." Bush's refusal to allow Rove's testimony is that policy in operation. As Time reported last October, the Bush team started planning this endgame before the last election:

The President's team has been planning for what one strategist describes as "a cataclysmic fight to the death" over the balance between Congress and the White House if confronted with congressional subpoenas it deems inappropriate. The strategist says the Bush team is "going to assert that power, and they're going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court on every issue, every time, no compromise, no discussion, no negotiation."

It's not surprising that the Bush team is resolved to stonewall here; it's highly probable many in the administration face ruin or prison if investigations go forward unimpeded, so they're fighting for their lives. The prospect of being penalized at the ballot box is utterly trivial in comparison. They've bet everything and so the cover-up must hold, at least until the distraction of the next electoral cycle, at least until pardons can be issued without immediate penalty. This being the case, probably the only effective mode of investigation will be impeachment, under the auspices of which the President cannot conceal crimes by asserting executive privilege.

Impeachment is a radical cure but the condition is grave indeed. For too long the Democrats' dereliction has taken this form: "Give the Republicans enough rope and they'll hang themselves." But clearly the Rovians know many better ways to make use of the slack. It is well past time to have some accountability, and timidly conventional halfway measures will not get it done. All Americans, but especially Democrats, need to press their representatives (and those campaigning to be such) for their plans to hold the authors of recent and ongoing catastrophes accountable. This might serve as talking point in lieu of a plan to work miracles in Iraq.

Some Republicans, especially the White House spokesman, are already calling the investigations "partisan" — a colossal projection by Mayberry Machiavellis. But it may well be that only a pragmatic crossover Republican can breathe life into an impeachment of his party's head — as Joe Lieberman did in the last egregious instance. As the full awfulness, the reckless squandering of American treasure, blood and honor, the pervasive criminality of the Bush administration reveal themselves to congressional committees with subpoenas and a new mission, we may hope that the decent Republicans will awaken from their lockstepping sleepwalk and return to their principles. Others may have other less noble reasons to separate themselves from the Rove machine.

Some will object, like the New Mexico Democrat who voted down the petition to impeach with this, "You can't impeach a man for being stupid." But when the stupidity involves reckless disregard for deadly consequences which results in thousands of utterly needless deaths, can we still not impeach? And of course it is not only stupidity. There were laws on the books against torture and against warrantless wiretapping — to name only two. The breaking of those laws is irrefutably documented; at the very least the people should know on whose orders they were broken. If there is no case for impeachment here, then impeachment is never warranted, then impeachment is a legal fiction which ought to be stricken from the citizens' notion of Constitutional possibilities. Bushie Kyle Sampson should have been speaking of impeachment power when he famously wrote, "If we don't ever exercise it then what's the point of having it?" We could start small, say with Gonzales and Rove.

There is a pragmatic reason for impeachment, even at this late stage of the Bush administration. The nearly complete immunity from prosecution that White House officials have enjoyed through perjury and pardon has, in the language of the Bushies, emboldened, rewarded and enriched the criminal element in the GOP. There is a direct causal connection between Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon, and George Bush's attempted suspension of the Constitution, along with the crimes which have taken place in the highest reaches of most lawless administration of them all. Indeed, given the revolving-door overlap among personnel in recent Republican White Houses, it would be surprising if the favored practices of the earliest were not adopted, adapted and perfected by the latest.

Watergate definitely changed things, and so did Iran-Contra — the cover-ups are getting better and better with each neo-Nixonian administration. There are no tape recorders in the Rove Oval Office, and the next shredding-party will be discreet. Directly as the cover-ups get better, accountability diminishes and the criminality becomes more pervasive and bold. This is why it is absolutely necessary to fully investigate, prosecute and repudiate lawbreaking by the President and his subordinates. The house that Rove built must be burned to the ground, and salt spread upon the ashes.

Against demurrers about partisanship and divisiveness, I offer this little known yet abundantly documented cautionary tale, from Christopher Hitchens, born-again neo-con and scourge of Democrats everywhere:

In late 1968 the Johnson Administration discovered that Nixon was engaged in secret dealings with the South Vietnamese junta. Nixon told them that if they sabotaged the Paris peace talks by pulling out at the last minute — they pulled out two days before the vote — they would get a better bargain from the incoming Republicans... All accounts agree; the tapes and the evidence of Nixon's treason were put in front of Humphrey. If he had gone public he could have delivered an annihilating counterblow. But he decided that this would be uncivil and partisan, and that it would also shake people's confidence in their leaders. So he put bipartisanship first — and was justly humiliated.

So "civility" won out. Treason was whitewashed. The Vietnam War went on for seven more years at hideous cost, spilling over into the killing field of Cambodia. Nixon went on to give us Watergate, for which he was pardoned and released into a wealthy retirement that saw him cosseted by partisans who called it all a witch hunt about a "two-bit burglary." Nixon's MO gave us the October Surprise, which gave us Reagan/Bush, Iran-Contra and a shadow government disguised as the war on terror. The failure to impeach for this allowed George W. Bush to promise to return his father's style to the White House and not be laughed at. At the present rate of decay American democracy will not survive another iteration. It is time to take the radical cure.

E-mail David Essex at djessex@earthlink.net.