Without Republican control of Congress and its cover-up for six years, the Bush administration's rancid corruption would've long ago been exposed. And had an honest attorney general been on duty, dozens of Bush appointees would be behind bars and impeachment of the president and Vice President Cheney might well have been launched.
Each day dawns with a new disgrace, new twists on scandal, new lies and new attempted cover-ups as America's most dishonest presidency is unmasked.
Nothing more eloquently bespeaks scandal as the announcement that Monica Goodling, special counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his liaison with the White House, is taking the Fifth Amendment against criminal self-incrimination in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. A lawyer close to the AG and the president taking the Fifth and unwilling to tell the truth under oath means only one thing: She knows enough about, and participated in, misconduct that could mean prison for conspiracy.
As for Gonzales, the unspeakably incompetent and ethically rotten political toady grubbing through life on a sob-sister tale of his roots in Hispanic poverty, he can't get his lies straight about the firings. How eerily similar are his ethics to President Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, who was imprisoned for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice in the Watergate burglary that brought down Nixon.
The doleful litany continues: General Service Administration administrator Lurita Alexis Doan is under investigation for hanky panky with government contracts and friends.
Comes the Pentagon, announcing that nine Army officers, including four generals (!), falsely promoted the heroic tale that NFL star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman died in an al-Qaeda ambush while concealing the truth—his own squad killed Tillman. The brass obviously were lapdog lackeys to Bush's doctrine of manufacturing fiction to sell the war in Iraq.
Now the former No. 2 man in the Interior Department, J. Steven Grilles, awaits sentencing for lying about his ties to convicted lobbyist-briber Jack Abramoff.
All this in quick succession after Scooter Libby, Cheney's hatchet-man sidekick, was convicted of criminal perjury and now faces prison.
However, the most hideous of these sleazy characters is Gonzales. He betrayed his oath as the people's lawyer to perform as a political bottom crawler for Bush and Cheney, rubber-stamping unethical and lawless Oval Office wishes while ignoring corruption all around him, not to mention approving torture of detainees (Geneva Conventions, he said, are "quaint") and ignoring desecration of constitutional liberties.
As if to confirm his own culpability as a practiced liar, President Bush defends his rogue's gallery of crooked cronies as "honorable public servants."
