[NYTr] Bush Gang & Co-Conspirators: Good Riddance to Them All

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

McClatchy - Nov 21, 2007
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/21921.html

Good riddance to them all

By Joseph L. Galloway

There was little for the unindicted co-conspirators of the Bush
administration to give thanks for this week as the clock winds down on
the 14 months they have left in power.

With former White House press secretary Scott McClellan spilling the
beans on who told him to lie to the American people and cover up the
White House's responsibility for the criminal act of revealing the
identity of a covert CIA officer, it clearly was time for some folks to
begin drafting their requests for presidential pardons.

McClellan, in a forthcoming book that will tell some, if not all,
reveals that his 2003 statements absolving top White House aides Karl
Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of any involvement in leaking the
identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame were untrue — and that the orders
to make those statements came from President Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, Rove and Libby.

McClellan's revelation makes it abundantly clear that a subsequent
statement by Bush that White House aides had no involvement in outing
Ms. Plame, and that anyone who did would be fired was also, shall we
say, inoperative.

It also confirms long-held suspicions that the whole despicable affair
— an attempt to punish former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for debunking a
bit of the bogus intelligence the administration wheeled out to justify
invading Iraq — was orchestrated in the offices of Bush and Cheney, and
with their knowledge.

It also might shed new light on why Bush quickly commuted Cheney’s
hatchet man Libby's prison sentence after he was convicted on four
counts of lying to federal investigators. It simply wouldn’t do to have
Libby rolling over on his bosses.

Somehow, I have a strong feeling that this isn't the only or the last
revelation of wrong-doing and criminality that we're likely to hear
before and after Bush and Co. leave office, or that additional
presidential acts of clemency will be needed to spare other top
administration officials from prison and buy their silence.

What we've witnessed and endured during seven long years of the Bush
presidency is the inevitable consequence of bringing vicious and
unprincipled but successful political campaigners — attack dogs — into
top White House jobs.

The idea that a political campaign should address any and all criticism
by going for the throats of those who dare to question it may work on
election day but it doesn’t work, or shouldn’t, when the full weight
and power of the federal government is put behind it.

We are a better people and this is a better country than that, and this
is why, when it's weighed and judged, the Bush presidency will be found
to have perverted not only our system but also the very principles on
which our nation was founded.

We don’t rush into a war that has cost so many lives and so much
national treasure, and has so damaged our standing in the world, based
on a tissue of lies. But under the leadership of George W. Bush, that's
what we did in Iraq.

We don’t stand idly by, backs turned and eyes closed, while in wartime
our friends and political contributors loot the national treasury of
billions of taxpayer dollars. But the Bush administration and a
Republican-controlled Congress did just that.

We don’t send our soldiers and Marines into combat without enough of
everything they need to fight, survive and win. But that's what this
administration and its political operatives in charge of the Pentagon
did.

We don’t turn the office of the attorney general and key parts of the
Justice Department into a branch of a partisan political campaign —
gutting offices charged with protecting the civil rights of minorities
and directing the prosecution of those of a different political party —
but this administration did.

We don’t declare war and then expect that the entire sacrifice will be
borne by the half a percent of our population who wear uniforms. We
don’t fight a long and costly war by cutting taxes on the wealthiest
Americans and borrowing trillions of dollars to finance it from foreign
competitors such as China. But this administration did.

We don’t prosecute a war to spread democracy by curtailing democracy
and suspending the Bill of Rights at home. We cannot promote our
principles abroad by denying the same principles — the right to a
lawyer, the right to a fair trial, the right to be secure in our homes
— to ourselves. But this administration did.

We don’t beat or torture confessions out of prisoners in violation of
our laws and the laws of the civilized world. We don’t lock people up
and hold them incommunicado for years without charges or trials. But
this administration did and does.

We don’t applaud and cheer an administration and a Congress that make
the rich vastly richer, the middle class less secure and the poor even
poorer. But this administration has done just that, in violation of our
principles and the principles of love, peace and charity that are
engrained in the Christianity that these rogues and charlatans embrace
so publicly but violate every day.

It will be a good day when they are gone, and good riddance to them all.