Some Interesting Background Information On PoliceStateGate

I watched The Tweety Show yesterday, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing. As I watched Chris Matthews and his guests gush over our Deserter-In-Chief, it struck me that an uninformed person watching that show would have concluded that Bush is a popular president instead of one who has an approval rating in the mid-to-high 30s (even FauxNews has Bush at 41%).

All they could talk about was how great Bush is doing and how all of the scandals currently affecting his presidency are of no real consequence. One Tweety Show commentator even said that the PoliceStateGate Scandal is pretty much over and that Bush has come out on top on that one. [Correction: It was actually Tweety himself who put forth this assertion by asking one of his guests: "How is the president turning the NSA surveillance question into a winner politically?" What a scumbag.] The hearings haven't even started, yet the Corporate Media are already declaring that Bush will actually benefit from that particular scandal.

Well, thank God certain members of the Press are still willing to do some real reporting on Bush's so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program." The latest issue of Newsweek reveals that there was a group of Justice Department lawyers who fought Cheney and the other Administration officials who were (and still are) intent on pissing all over the Constitution.

It was previously revealed that former Deputy Attorney General James Comey refused in 2004 to re-authorize Bush's secret domestic wiretap program when John Ashcroft was recovering from surgery. Newsweek now reports that Comey was the central figure in a group of Justice Department lawyers who had refused to drink the kool-aid with regard to BushCo's illegal spying operation:

These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law.

They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.

Anyway, definitely read the article if you want to some good background information in the run-up to the hearings on this scandal. The two things I took away from it are: (1) PoliceStateGate has less to do with protecting our country and more to do with the extreme right's perception that "the executive branch was pitifully weakened by the backlash from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal;" and (2) David Addington -- the guy who became Cheney's chief of staff after Scooter Libby resigned in disgrace -- is a genuine asshole as well as a legitimate threat to our country and its Constitution.