Elephant Stampede

In the post below I ask, in light of House Government Affairs Committee Chairman Henry Waxman's evident inability to rub three brain cells together, how such idiotic, rank fantasists could possibly have duped enough voters into putting them back into power.

Regrettably, the answer is never long in returning to me: they had a lot of help:

Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire became the first Republican in Congress to call for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's dismissal [Tues]day, hours after President Bush expressed confidence in his embattled Cabinet officer.

Interesting timing, no? Bad enough this pussy sideswipes Speedy, but he backstabs his own President in the same swing.

Gonzales has been fending off Democratic demands for his firing after disclosures surrounding the ousters of eight US attorneys - dismissals Democrats have characterized as a politically motivated purge.

Yeah, eight out of ninety-three, for the "political" offense of refusing to enforce election laws. Some "purge". You'd think it would be easier for Sununu to point this out than be a cringing bootlicker.

Support from many Republicans has been muted, but there had been no outright GOP call for his dismissal.

"I think the President should replace him," Sununu said in an interview. "I think the attorney general should be fired."...

Pray tell, why do you "think" this, Senator? I know what I think about what you claim to "think," but I want to hear your version first.

Sununu said the firings of the prosecutors, together with a report Friday by the Justice Department's inspector general criticizing the Administration's use of secret national security letters to obtain personal records in terrorism probes, shattered his confidence in Gonzales.

"We need to have a strong, credible attorney general that has the confidence of Congress and the American people," said Sununu, who faces a tough reelection campaign next year. "Alberto Gonzales can't fill that role." [emphasis added]

Blasted Boston Globe, always stealing my thunder. But at least they let Senator Ankle-Grabber provide a little context for his treachery:

Sununu has long been a critic of what he has said were the White House's disregard for civil liberties in its war on terrorism. He played a large part in forcing the Administration to accept new curbs on its power during the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act last year.

So much for his confidence in Speedy being "shattered." Quite obviously Sununu never had any "confidence" in the A-G to begin with, and this is how he plans to play kiss-ass with the "blue" voters he "thinks" he can woo over to his column next year in a state that the Dems managed to flip in 2004. Only it'll never work, because Sununu will have an "R" after his name, and that means he'll have the scarlet letters "BUSH" emblazoned on his image like a concentration camp tattoo - the Democrats and the Enemy Media will make sure of it. In the mean time he'll alienate his base supporters, without whom he equally as obviously cannot win, "swing" voters be damned. As if he wouldn't be buried in Hillary's landslide anyway no matter what he did.

Some days you get the donkey and other days the donkey gets you. At least that's one version of that old adage. When it's one of the latter days, the least a pachyderm can do is go down fighting, and with his/her honor intact. John Sununu, Jr. will be sent home as a coward and a disgrace.

And he won't be alone:

At a closed-door meeting of the Senate Republican Conference earlier in the week, the consensus among the forty-nine GOP senators was that Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales should step down.

"Most of us who were present felt he should go," said one senator who requested anonymity [naturally - at least we know this wasn't Sununu]. Although the discussion at the meeting of the Conference focused primarily on the upcoming debate on funding for U.S. troops in Iraq, the senator told me today, there was also "some discussion" of the embattled attorney general and his recent performance in explaining the forced resignations of eight U.S. attorneys. The senator said that the feeling was that Gonzales - whom he said has never had a close relationship with him and his Republicans - should resign "soon."

"Embattled," my ass. The Democrats are trying to "embattle" Speedy in the sense that the Bush Administration is a fly and the Donks are trying to pluck off its Cabinet like the wings and legs and thorax and the really icky parts. Bush already tossed them Don Rumsfeld right after the '06 election, they're trying to bring down Vice President Cheney via the relentless and equally empty "Plamegate" campaign, and right now it's Gonzales' turn in the barrel. If Gonzales is "embattled," he's got Senate Republicans to thank for it.

I can't help noticing Senator Anonymous' choice of words: Speedy "has never had a close relationship with him and his Republicans." Just which Republicans is he referring to? Is this evident disdain, if not outright snobbery, directed solely at Gonzales or is it a veiled swipe at the President as well? As if to blame Bush for "his" Republicans losing power last November, and not their own profligacy, mushy moderation, and chicken-hearted, knock-kneed fecklessness.

Oh, heaven knows Dubya isn't doing much to shoot down this nonsense. Indeed, his prosecutorial generosity to his partisan enemies may finally be coming back to bite him where it hurts the most:

“It is remarkable that this is what it comes down to after the disgraceful Sandy Burglar sweetheart plea, the inexplicable lack of movement on the Jefferson investigation, that would be Congressman William ["Icebox Willie"] Jefferson (D-LA) who is now on the Homeland Security Committee, despite the fact that there are two people who have pled guilty to bribing...Jefferson. Also, the happenstance of his being on tape taking a $100,000 bribe, $90,000 of which was seized from his refrigerator, and there is an agent who has sworn under oath that he obstructed the search of his home.

“We've had the about-face on José Padilla, now he's an enemy combatant, now he's a criminal defendant, keeps going back and forth. We've had the sudden shift of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program to the FISA court after a year of the Administration asserting that this vital program couldn't work under the FISA statute, then they put it under the FISA statute. We've had a lack of movement on any of the wartime classified information leaks, not one. And the absence of meaningful immigration enforcement against employers and on the borders.”

Now, if you look at this - and this is just a partial list, but these are the big stories. These are the things the Justice Department is not doing....The Justice Department is doing diddly-squat. I think if you're a liberal Democrat, you've got to look at Alberto Gonzales and you've got to love him. He's not doing anything! He went after Scooter Libby - well, not he, but he didn't stop it. You look at the Scooter Libby fiasco. You look at this fiasco. The Drive-By Media is getting away with totally mischaracterizing this as an abuse of presidential power, comparing it now to Watergate over and over and over again. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is sitting on its hands and not doing anything. It gives rise to the question: who's really running the show in this place?....[Y]ou have to ask who's in there bottling this stuff up? Who's making sure it doesn't happen?

This is not about the US attorneys. The US attorneys are located in 93 cities and states. I'm asking questions about the justice department. The same thing could be asked about State. The same thing could be asked about the Pentagon. The same thing could be asked about CIA. What's frustrating about it is the Administration seems...just willing to bend over and give the Democrats part of what they want every time they start bellyaching and complaining....

What do we get? We get breathless, unrelenting pursuits of Scooter Libby over a process crime, and now we've got this phony controversy going on.

For all the constant gibber-gabber I keep hearing from people ranging from Limbaugh to Dick Morris about the "civil war" in the Democrat Party, the only fratricide I actually see in the political firmament resides squarely in the GOP. And the hell of it is that it's all deserved, and yet is the biggest threat to any chance the Party has of even holding on to whatever assets it's got left, never mind regaining all that they've recently lost.

The biggest casualty at the moment, though, is Republican self-respect. Just the fact alone of the woman responsible for the mass sacking of over eleven times as many U.S. attorneys fourteen years ago for blatantly "political" reasons condemning the Bushies in high moral dudgeon for their token eight ought to have the minority collectively laughing their jackass colleagues right off Capitol Hill, and should relegate the latter to "pimple on White House ass" level in Bushville.

But that wouldn't fit the "New Tone," now, would it?

I swear, that is going to be George W. Bush's political epitaph when it's all said and done. The only question is whether the tombstone will sit over a mass grave.

[h/t: GOP Bloggers]