Sanctimonious bellowing out of Washington over the past week or so is what's known as political smokescreen.
· Attorney General Alberto Gonzales threatens to dust off a 1917 World War I law and possibly charge New York Times reporters with espionage for exposing the Bush administration's commandeering of private phone records. Gonzales sniffs he's only enforcing laws.
But this same Gonzales advised President Bush to ignore the Geneva Conventions (same as law, right?) on humane treatment of detainees and proceed with torture of terror suspects. Gonzales also gave Bush the okay to ignore 750 laws Congress enacted and the president signed. And Gonzales has turned a blind eye to the administration wiretapping telephones without required warrants from a special court.
As for that lawless New York Times, well . . . !!
· Then, huffy Republicans and Democrats howl about the FBI searching Rep. William Jefferson's office for bribery evidence (Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, was videotaped accepting $100,000 in marked bills in a sting). A constitutional crisis, they roared.
A court may need to sort out that dispute. But if lawmakers are outraged about their rights, they've played dead about President Bush trampling on others' rights with his heavy-handed "war on terror" -- secrecy, ignoring rights of detainees, eavesdropping on American phones, scooping up phone records, seizing suspects and dragging them overseas for grilling.
· Mark Salter, Sen. John McCain's chief of staff and his ghostwriter was filled with pique that anyone dared rebuke his media-sainted boss. So he unleashed a toxic trashing of New School university student speaker Jean Sara Rohe, who probably set a new low in academic rudeness when she preceded McCain's commencement address by telling cheering classmates, "The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded . . ."
Then Salter posted a haughty Internet e-mail way off base: he challenged Ms. Rohe (he called her an "idiot") to compare her life's risks to McCain's.
Oy. At Rohe's college age, McCain was known as a rowdy Naval Academy midshipman scoring scholastically near the bottom of his class, frequently punished with demerits for misconduct and violating curfew hours, womanizing and brawling.
McCain has eloquently boasted about his Peck's Bad Boy years in books and even in his commencement address to the 1993 Annapolis graduating class.
Are those the sort of "risks" the sanctimonious Salter would wish Ms. Rohe -- a two-degree student near the top of her class, unlike McCain -- to emulate as a measure of her worth in life?
Pat Murphy
