GOP: The Party of Lawlessness. Four Decades of Criminal Behavior.
February 1, 2010

 
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I‘m probably not telling you anything that hasn’t crossed your mind already, but sometimes we just need to say things out loud for them to sink in: For all their talk about “patriots” and “love of America”, the GOP really HAS become a party with a total lack of respect for the law (apologies to Sheriff Buford T. Justice).

Two recent events helped put a punctuation mark on this: the arrest of Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, and the recent decision by the Conservative-controlled Supreme Court overturning over 100 years of precedent regarding “corporate campaign contributions”, giving Corporations… even foreign owned ones… the same First Amendment rights as American citizens.

Now, you’d be perfectly justified in thinking me brain-dead if only now, after eight years of Bush & Cheney’s law breaking, I was just beginning to realize Republicans have no respect for the law. But The Bush Years were mere straws on the camels back. This has been going on for decades.

The O’Keefe break-in, where he and three friends (two of whom dressed as telephone repairmen) accessed Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in an apparent attempt to bug her telephone, has been dubbed “Little Watergate”, referring to Nixon’s botched break-in/bugging of the National Democratic headquarters in 1972. So now we’re looking at a 38 year history of Republican disregard for the Rule of Law. (You’re excused if you don’t know too much about this story, as there has been a near media-blackout regarding it. O’Keefe’s first “story”, a questionable and highly edited condemnation of a select few ACORN workers suggesting things they shouldn’t have, made ALL the major networks. And Fox turned O’Keefe into a minor celebrity. Flash forward a few months to his arrest last week, and it’s “O’Keefe who?”)

Republicans LOVE to preach to others about law & order… citing it frequently in the late 90’s as the justification for impeaching Bill Clinton over something as trivial as lying about having an affair with a young intern. The argument was that “the affair itself is irrelevant. He lied about the affair UNDER OATH, and therefore is guilty of a Federal crime” (the reason “the affair itself was irrelevant” is because several of President Clinton’s chief critics, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich and prominent Senator Henry Hyde were BOTH having extra-marital affairs and publicly lying about it at the time. But neither had to testify to that fact “under oath”. Lucky for them.)

Vice President Dick Cheney outed an undercover CIA Agent (obliterating an entire undercover operation dedicated to monitoring Iran’s nuclear weapons program, jeopardizing the lives of all involved) because her husband called him out for lying about Iraq’s WMD capabilities in the New York Times. His Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted of “obstruction of justice” while investigating the outing of said CIA Agent.

President Bush’s chief adviser and campaign guru Karl Rove decided for himself that he (and Bush’s personal lawyer Harriet Myers) could ignore subpoenas ordering them to testify before a Senate inquiry regarding their role in the outing of CIA Agent Plame. Since nether bothered to show, and the Democratic Congress seems unwilling to press the issue, we may never know what role they played (I would add “if any”, but there is no question… by his own admission… that Rove played a role.)

In 1987, Ronald Reagan… the heart & soul of today’s Republican Party… testified “I can’t remember” 57 times (or was it over 100?) during the Iran/Contra hearings, where it was finally concluded that St. Ronnie really had traded “arms for hostages”:

REAGAN (videotape, 3/4/87): A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

By the time the Reagan Administration was over in 1989, 132 Reagan administration officials had either been indicted or subjects of either “misconduct” or outright “criminal” investigations.

Speaking of “criminal investigations”, who can forget Kyle Sampson, the Chief of Staff for Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales pleading “I don’t remember” 122 times before a Congressional investigation into the illegal firing of eight (Wiki says “seven”) federal prosecutors in December of 2006 because they wouldn’t do the Bush Administrations bidding to pursue frivolous prosecutions of Democrats engaged in close mid-term election races.

The Bush Administration was certainly a high-water mark for skirting the Rule of Law, from warrantless wiretaps of American citizens, the use of torture to extract information from “enemy combatants” held in legal limbo at Gitmo, “free-speech zones”, suspending Habeas Corpus for American citizens accused of “terrorism”, crafting the “Patriot Act” that gave them sweeping unconstitutional powers hurried through in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, not to mention the illegality of the invasion of Iraq itself (hearkening back to Kissinger’s illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1969).

But I’m not looking here to rehash all the crimes of the Bush Administration specifically.
 

This week also saw the conviction of Scott Roeder, the Right-wing Anti-abortion extremist that murdered Dr. George Tiller… or, if you live in Mankato, MN, it was Doctor Tiller who was convicted in his own murder according to their headline: “Tiller Convicted in Abortion Doctor’s Murder“. Dumb mistake or Freudian slip? I’ll let you decide.

Roeder proudly regaled his crime for the jury, making his conviction all but certain (this was Kansas after-all). “Justifiable homicide” seems to be a recurring theme on the Rabid-Right, or hadn’t you noticed? But so is “blinding fear of the outside world”.

After weeks of Republican outcries over the “insanity” of putting accused terrorists “on trial like common criminals”, the Obama Administration finally relented on trying alleged 9/11 mastermind “KSM” in New York City at the request of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. To his credit, Bloomberg did not back down in response to Right-wing pressure against trying “terrorists” inside the United States, instead citing “rising costs” and “logistics” making such a trial there impractical. If I had my guess, I’d say the rising complication of holding the trial in NYC is more due to RW crazies protesting the trial and possibly threatening the courthouse with “bomb threats” than any alleged fear of “terrorist reprisals”. (THINK: these people have been in Gitmo for eight years. How many attempted terrorist attacks have there been on that facility?)

I received a RW email chain letter last week suggesting that the reason President Obama was so eager to try/convict terrorists in civilian court was to avoid having to personally sign their death warrant (presumably because he’s “a fellow Muslim”) vs conviction via military tribunal. I responded with a lengthy reply pointing out how, after World War II, we put the Nazi’s on trial, publicly, before cameras and on radio. We gave them lawyers and even allowed them to take the stand where they could “spout their Nazi propaganda”. Suddenly, 60+ years later, we’re all frightened children that cower in fear over the idea of letting an accused terrorist hang themselves with their own words on the stand? Sorry, I don’t get that. No, instead, these “Rule of Law” Republicans prefer “military tribunals” conducted in secrecy where hearsay and “confessions” obtained through torture are admitted as evidence.

Rush Limbaugh once called drug abuse “abhorrent behavior” on his radio show, and that those who wish to “legalize drugs” should go “to London and Zurich”, before it was discovered that Limbaugh himself was a degenerate drug abuser, using his maid to buy his illegal drugs for him.

You must understand. To Republicans, law breakers are degenerate scum with no respect for “America, for which it stands”… until it’s THEM at odds with the law, and then suddenly it’s “liberal activism” obstructing them, and therefore the law can be ignored, giving them a clean conscious. It’s how two Supreme Court justices can swear to uphold “precedent” and “not legislate from the bench” one day, and overturn 103 years of precedent the next. It’s how a “documentary filmmaker” can don disguises and engage in likely criminal (certainly dishonest) behavior in the name of “exposing criminal behavior” without a hint of irony. It’s how a man can proudly defend murdering a doctor he accuses of “murdering babies”. It is how Republican critics of “illegal immigration” can employ undocumented workers with a clear conscious. It’s how indicted felon and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay can appear on “Dancing with the Stars” without an ounce of shame. And it is how the Fox Opinion Channel can call itself a “News” organization with a straight face.

PETITION ALERT: Be sure and vote for our Economic Stimulus Program recommendation to “Green-ify thousands of Federal office buildings and order thousands of American-made hybrid mail trucks, creating jobs that provide new job skills and encourage industrial development, all while reducing our energy costs, cutting greenhouse emissions and building infrastructure”. Link on left. Sign and pass it on.

 


 

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February 1, 2010 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: General, Politics, Seems Obvious to Me

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