[lit-ideas] Re: The police are satisfied
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 12:20:42 -0700
Judy Evans wrote:
Gonzales. Why didn't he get the Supreme Court nomination? (I thought
Bush would nominate a woman, but a lot of people seem to have thought
it would be Gonzales.)
Gonzales didn't get it because Bush was trying to quickly change the
subject from Rovegate. Gonzales was, it turns out, implicated in the
early part of that investigation (or, in its early stages,
non-investigation).
From Frank Rich's piece in yesterday's Times:
Eight Days in July
By FRANK RICH
PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after
all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in
the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the
hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of
the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed
showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been
more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to
change this subject.
When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for
themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the
conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the
intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate
efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare
and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is
in its "last throes."
Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post
nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper
instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the
week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer
Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush
administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked
the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for
secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity
was covert.
But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the
forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much
a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to
put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace
Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not
nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr.
Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who
find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva
Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that
inspires real fear.
As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice
Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation
into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30
p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform
the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to
the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by
the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John
Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame
case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as
closely as an 181â2-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that
any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said
Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was
first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process
now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr.
Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16
months.
Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House
casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the
early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory
scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.
[There's more, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/opinion/24rich.html?pagewanted=print
You may have to register; it's free.] I like Rich's stuff.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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