Traitors

In physiology, the word, 'accommodation' has a special meaning. It's what a nerve does when it's constantly stimulated--say, by a paper cut. It hurts like hell right away...and certainly keeps hurting for a long while...but not as severely as at first. The nervous system is 'accommodating' the pain to make it more manageable.

This is a lot like the response of the body politic to the Bush Administration. After a while, you're simply dulled to more outrage in what those people are doing to destroy our country. But even amidst the nightmare of Iraq, the lingering sorrow of Katrina, the endless hypocrisies and outright lies, we need to marshall strength to fully internalize the danger represented by the firings of U.S. Attorneys who were deemed insufficiently political.

One of the hallmark boogeymen of the radical right is the 'activist judge'--someone who will put his own personal political views above the law. As with so many other of their yelps, this is pure projection--assigning to others the exact thing which you, yourself, are guilty of.

A case in point is the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., longtime clubhouse for activist judges of the radical right. Two members with impeccable whack-job credentials, David Sentelle and Laurance Silberman (now retired), have been vital instruments for attack dog conservatives. Sentelle was a full co-conspirator in the costly and fruitless Ken Starr follies. Silberman served as co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, where he helped fully shift blame from the White House to the intelligence community for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Other current and former GOP appointees to this panel include Robert Bork ('high executioner' for Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate era), Clarence Thomas (steadfast supporter of 'states rights' until he flip-flopped in order to deliver the throne to Bush in 2000), Antonin Scalia (see description for Thomas), Ken Starr (raised as the son of a Texas Church of Christ minister, which fueled a lifelong obsession with other people's sex lives), and current Chief Justice John Roberts (the 'good one', who claimed no intent to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite being married to a member of the oxymoronically named Feminists for Life).

These 'jurists' define the danger of the 'activist judge'. Historically, they will bend or break the law in any way required to make sure that their particular beliefs are served. These are the kind of people who voice no concern when a delegation of right wing congressional aides is dispatched to Palm Beach County to bang long enough and hard enough on glass windows until the court-mandated recount of a presidential election by terrified workers is permanently ended. Scalia is the one who explained his vote on that same election issue as necessary, or '...candidate Bush might be deprived of his victory'. Not an activist bone in that body, is there?

Anyway, if you're clued in at all to the controversy over the U.S. Attorneys General, the White House now admits its role in a plan to replace certain of those prosecutors based on criteria that included those who, "...exhibited loyalty" to the administration, or those conversely who, "...chafed against administration initiatives". The U.S. Attorney in Arkansas was dumped in order to make room for an assistant to Karl Rove. The young, 30-something aide at the Justice Department assigned to carry out this plan was himself lobbying for appointment to the prosecutor's job in his home state of Utah.

The story gained momentum when it was revealed over the weekend that a prosecutor in New Mexico had received phone calls from a GOP member of the U.S. Senate...and a GOP Congresswoman...to make sure indictments of key Democrats were announced before the 2006 elections. When he refused to make that promise, he was hung up on. And soon thereafter, he was gone.

How can this be possible? Be legal? Actually, it wasn't--until a provision allowing it passed through unnoticed as part of the Patriot Act. At the time, many Americans trusted these people to keep us safe. But what happens when the people protecting you...are the ones you need protection from?

The simple paper cut may mend over time. But the Bush crew slices deeper every day. There is no accommodation. Their incision has now reached muscle, and threatens bone. How do we make the pain go away?

diderot