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![]() Just Above Sunset
July 24, 2005 - Let the fun begin! ('Here come da judge, here come da judge!')
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Early last Tuesday evening
in Los Angeles: President Bush chose
federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday as his first nominee for the Supreme Court, selecting a rock solid
conservative whose nomination could trigger a tumultuous battle over the direction of the nation's highest court, a senior
administration official said. And over an hour after
the announcement the opening way this: President Bush named
federal appeals judge John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy in a decade, delighting Republicans
and unsettling Democrats by picking a young jurist of impeccably conservative credentials. … Well, the core of the Republican
Party was a bit slow to be delighted. As I heard on the cable shows in the background,
out in Colorado Springs, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, the gatekeeper of Republican values (evangelical Christian
rule of the avenging American Jesus), took an hour to think about whether this was a good thing, then gave his stamp of approval. The left is not yet jumping up and down in anger, although they need an hour or two. "The president has chosen
someone with suitable legal credentials, but that is not the end of our inquiry," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid
of Nevada. Referring to planned hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Reid said, "I will not prejudge this nomination.
I look forward to learning more about Judge Roberts." And so it begins. … it's too soon
to start opposing Judge John G. Roberts. Most of us knew nothing about him before tonight. He's only been a Judge for two
years. Before that he was deputy solicitor general. The legal arguments he made while working for the Government or as a corporate
lawyer may or may not reflect his personal values, or how he would rule as a Supreme Court Justice. And it's not like the other
news is going away, even if all else will be sparsely reported. This could be
a good, juicy fight and our news media, chasing the advertising bucks, does not multi-task much. Our press is more hedgehog than fox - in fact, Fox News ought to be called Hedgehog News (see Hedgehogs and Foxes from December 21, 2003 in these pages). Joseph Wilson comes before
us as a man whose word is effectively worthless. What do you do, if you work for the Bush administration, when a man of such
quality is being lionized by an anti-war press? Well, you can fold your tent and let them print the legend. Or you can say
that the word of a mediocre political malcontent who is at a loose end, and who is picking up side work from a wife who works
at the anti-regime-change CIA, may not be as "objective" as it looks. I dare say that more than one supporter of regime change
took this option. I would certainly have done so as a reporter if I had known. Unpacking that it comes
down to the CIA being anti-regime-change fools and cowards who couldn't see the truth.
Yeah, yeah. But why mess with preliminaries?
The Iraq Survey Group more or less owned Iraq for more than a year, had access to all the evidence leading up the war, all
the evidence in Iraq, all the scientists arrested by the US military, everything we've learned since the war. … the
ISG concluded that Saddam's regime had not sought uranium either at home or abroad since 1991, period. Oh, lots - but why bother?
… the White House
political operation wasn't lashing out just because of Joe Wilson. They were lashing out because they believed their political
lives depended on their own supporters continuing to believe that Saddam had been actively working on a nuke program. Without
that belief, they'd lose support within their own base even if they eventually found evidence of chem and bio programs. Perhaps so. That works, but it doesn't fix anything. The real victims are
the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the
Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing
diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes
are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a CIA operative who posed for
Vanity Fair. Well, maybe it is really
about the whole war. Our friends and colleagues
have difficult jobs gathering the intelligence, which helps, for example, to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans at
home and abroad. They sometimes face great personal risk and must spend long hours away from family and friends. They serve
because they love this country and are committed to protecting it from threats from abroad and to defending the principles
of liberty and freedom. They do not expect public acknowledgement for their work, but they do expect and deserve their government’s
protection of their covert status. And who are these guys? And
this Larry C. Johnson, a registered republican who voted for Bush,
gave the Democratic Radio Address Saturday morning, the 23rd – pretty much word for word what is in the letter
above. The Democrats are now using the angry Republicans against the Bush-Rove-Cheney
crew. It just gets better all
the time.
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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