July 08, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE SAME OLD EXCUSE

Since George W. Bush transparently and egregiously covered his own backside in commuting the prison sentence of Scooter Libby, conservatives have--once again--been trying to deflect attention by chanting, "Clinton did it too." Presidents have pardon powers, so Clinton was only exercising the powers granted him by the Constitution. I don't know of any convincing evidence that any Clinton pardons were made to cover up major administration crimes. And how is the fact that Clinton pardoned people in any way relevant to this disgusting favorable treatment of Libby? Does it make the treatment of Libby any less disgusting? A right-winger in The Fresno Bee mentioned a link to the Internet about the Clinton pardons. If right-wingers are so exercised about Clinton's pardons, why aren't they equally upset about the treatment of Libby? Hypocrites! This commentary by Dan Froomkin is at www.washingtonpost.com:

And furthermore, there is an ethical chasm between Clinton's pardons -- unseemly as they were -- and Bush's decision to grant clemency to someone involved in an investigation of his own White House. (See my Tuesday column, Obstruction of Justice, Continued.)

As it happens, the previous granting of clemency that is most analogous to what Bush did dates back neither to the Clinton or even the Nixon era, but to Bush's father's presidency.

In 1992, on the eve of his last Christmas in the White House, George H.W. Bush pardoned former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others for their conduct related to the Iran-Contra affair, in which he himself was also loosely implicated.

REALITY VS. RIGHT WING IDEOLOGY

In the environs of right-wing fantasy land there is no bad tax cut for the wealthy, even if revenues needed for basic things like infrastructure aren't available. In the fantasy land trickle down economics is a good thing. In the real world it makes the already rich even more obscenely wealthy and deprives people not so fortunate of needed government services. In right-wing fantasy land big business is good and will police itself without the interference of government regulation. In the real world big business looks after itself and doesn't care in the least about the public good. This commentary by David Sirota looks at how the real world smacks right-wing ideologues in the face when they have to come back down to earth and deal with reality. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

In 2005, I wrote a national op-ed for Knight Ridder newspapers that showed how when right-wing congressional politicians return home as governors from the fantasy land known as Washington, D.C., they often drop their conservative economic elitism in the face of reality. Last week, I wrote that the conservative movement in the Rocky Mountain West is seeing this same economic elitism decline as an effective political cudgel, and not surprisingly, many Rocky Mountain states are watching their Republican parties descend into disrepair (here in Colorado, for instance, the GOP has resorted to hiring as party chairman the same supposed "guru" who most recently helped commandeer his boss George Allen from leading presidential candidate to historical cautionary tale). Now, up in Idaho, we see the convergence of both of these phenomena, as Gov. Butch Otter (R) has become yet another conservative Washington-insider-turned-home-state-economic-realist and yet another Rocky Mountain Republican fleeing his own party's elite consensus.

The Idaho Statesman reports that during Otter's 35 years as a career politician and icon of Wingnuttia with little to no executive responsibilities, "he has created an almost unblemished record of small-government libertarianism." But now in a role that requires real-world decisions - not right-wing sloganeering - Otter is "tell[ing] Idahoans that he need[s] to raise taxes by some $200 million" because he knows that many Idaho roads are deadly dangerous [while] others are so congested they threaten