Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Conservative = Criminal

For more than a quarter century, conservatives have successfully equated liberals with everything bad about American politics. Liberals, they intone, love high taxes. Liberals, they whine, are profligate wastrels of the public treasury. Liberals, they snarl, love terrorists. Liberals, they spit, hate the troops.

After more than five years of governance by the self-avowed conservative purists of the current regime, it is now apparent that conservatives can be described in a single word: criminals.

Their record of lawlessness is well established -- accepting bribes from lobbyists, facilitating bribes from lobbyists, shaking down American Indians to bankroll right-wing religious front groups, and that's just the Jack Abramoff case. Then there's Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-San Quentin) and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (R-Indicted). Not to mention the Royal shoplifter, or the Homeland Security Department's resident pedophile. And we haven't even considered the long -- and growing -- list of war crimes this crowd has perpetrated on at least three different continents.

It is a well-worn axiom that a fish rots from the head. And it is becoming more clear that the Clown Prince-in-Chief is himself a felon. He has admitted as much in public, flaunting his willful violation of the federal laws regulating whose wires can be tapped. So it should come as no surprise that the Royal Court's resident consiglieri has let his oath of omerta slip long enough to provide a prima facie case for another Article of Impeachment. As detailed in the National Journal and elsewhere, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has pinned a rap of obstructing justice, as well as interfering with a federal investigation, squarely on the crown of His Imperial Majesty George the Biscuit Eater, who personally intervened to kill an internal investigation of the illegal domestic spying program:

"During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, [Chairman Arlen] Specter asked Gonzales, 'Why wasn't OPR given clearances as so many other lawyers in the Department of Justice were given clearance?'
'The president of the United States makes decisions about who is ultimately given access,' Gonzales responded.
Pressing the attorney general further, Specter asked, 'Did the president make the decision not to clear OPR?'
Gonzales responded, 'As with all decisions that are non-operational in terms of who has access to the program, the president of the United States makes the decision.'"

There you go, Senator Specter -- indisputable proof that the current squatter at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has commited more crimes. Of course, Specter already knew about the Criminal-in-Chief. Indeed, he even crafted legislation about the flagrant abuse of the NSA that has been public knowledge for the last seven months. That legislation has only one goal: to make the illegal actions of the regime legal, retroactively.

Why, you might ask, would a man who makes such a show of being a maverick, who prides himself on his "morals" and "ethics" and puts them on public display at every opportunity, act as such a lapdog for the criminal regime?

It's simple. For all his protestations to the contrary, Arlen Specter is a conservative, too. And we now know what that means, don't we?