Music to read this blog to to: Edwin Starr asks: WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

AND ANOTHER VERSION

GONZALEZ IS GOING, GOING, GONE
WILL CHERTOFF REPLACE HIM?
WHO KILLED ANNA P?

Last Friday, Attorney General Gonzalez told President Bush he was following Karl Rove’s lead and stepping down. It didn’t become news until early Monday morning, and then in quick and typically secretive flash, Alberto was out of there. Gone in a gonzo journalistic moment. There was the obligatory press conference. He thanked POTUS; POTUS thanked him and then blamed smears and “politics” for doing him in. No crimes were apologized for; no mistakes were acknowleged. No lessons were learned.

It happened so fast that only the humorists were not taken aback. The phony blog site Newsgroper.com had a “blog entry” from the man who some critics called “Torture Boy.”

This weekend I privately submitted my resignation to President Bush. Reluctantly, he accepted it. I told him, that at this time, it was probably best for the American people to have someone else listening to their calls and going through their mail. Having accomplished just about everything I could have dreamed of as the Attorney General, I decided that it time to move on to greener pastures. What a track record though!

Daily Kos went for laughs too:

Washington, Aug. 27 (crAP) — Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, five minutes after having submitted his resignation to President George W. Bush, was asked by a passer-by whether the rumor was true that he had resigned.

“I have no memory of having submitted such a letter or of having any conversation with the President about anything at all,” Mr. Gonzales replied.

The former Attorney General immediately returned to his office at the Department of Justice, though he could not remember what he was supposed to do there.

Andy Borowitz was brilliant:

Domestic Surveillance Begins at Home,’ Former A.G. Says

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned today, effective immediately,
telling reporters that he wanted to spend more time eavesdropping on his
family.

Mr. Gonzales, a champion of domestic surveillance and warrantless wiretaps while in office, said he was “totally stoked” about turning his prying eyes on his own family.

OTHER COMMENTARY

There were some serious comments. First up, Sid Blumenthal in Salon:

Aug. 27, 2007 | When Alberto Gonzales swiftly turned heel on the stage at the Department of Justice without answering questions about his resignation as attorney general he left behind yet another lingering cloud of mystery. What is he not telling about his resignation?

The true story may be something like the denouement of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” which was in plain sight all along, a solution that can, as Poe wrote, “escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.” To be excessively obvious, Gonzales’ resignation, following Karl Rove’s exactly by two weeks, is the shadow of the first act.

Under investigation by the House and Senate Judiciary committees for his part in the political purge of U.S. attorneys and warrantless domestic surveillance, Gonzales wandered through his appearances down winding paths of dissembling. On the U.S. attorneys, his former deputies — his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and former deputy attorney general, Paul McNulty — contradicted him. On domestic spying, the former acting attorney general, James Comey, described then White House counsel Gonzales’ attempted coup on behalf of a program Comey considered illegal through Gonzales’ securing the signature of the ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft, barely able to lift his head in his hospital bed after surgery. After Gonzales offered a different account, FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared before the Senate on July 27 to corroborate Comey’s version, staking his position against Gonzales’ credibility. Senators called for the appointment of a special prosecutor.

John Nichols of the Nation wrote: “Gonzales Leaves But Investigation Must Continue.”

Gonzales, the former White House counsel who made clear during his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the nation’s top cop that he served President Bush rather than the Constitution, is announcing his exit strategy just days before the Congress returns from a summer break during which senators and representatives had gotten an earful about the need to get rid of Gonzales.

Revelations about the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen by the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations and prosecutions opened up an investigation that has begun to confirm a broad scheme to politicize the Justice Department’s work in the area of voting rights — a scheme apparently designed by Rove to suppress turnout by minorities and others who tend to vote Democratic.

The investigation into those machinations has hit the administration hard — so hard that the president is now jettisoning his oldest and closest aides in order to prevent the inquiry from evolving into a serious examination of his own lawlessness.

Da’ud X. Mohammed of the Geeze in Oregon noted:

”The big news, as measured by the number of e-mails we received on the subject was the Gonzales resignation. The Senate Judiciary Committee was fooled, made fools of, and allowed the greatest harm to the people of the United States when they confirmed Gonzales, Roberts and Alito. Whoever the Cheney-Bush White House sends up for confirmation cannot be a Republican ideologue, or a nutso Christian of the John Ashcroft variety, even though he resigned when he realized what Cheney-Bush was up to re: spying on Americans. We might not be so lucky next time. Neither can we accept an Opus Dei candidate.

DIGBY of the Daily Kos Rote noted:

There was an interesting little factoid in Joshua Green’s great article on Karl Rove in this month’s Atlantic, that has everyone scratching their heads:
Hurricane Katrina clearly changed the public perception of Bush’s presidency. Less examined is the role Rove played in the defining moment of the administration’s response: when Air Force One flew over Louisiana and Bush gazed down from on high at the wreckage without ordering his plane down. Bush advisers Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett wanted the president on the ground immediately, one Bush official told me, but were overruled by Rove for reasons that are still unclear: “Karl did not want the plane to land in Louisiana.” Rove’s political acumen seemed to be deserting him altogether.

That picture of Bush looking down on the city from on high in his favorite little Air Force One costume was a terrible image. But there can be no doubt that what Rove was thinking about in those moments was not whether it would be good for the country or the people of New Orleans for the president to get on the ground immediately. He was thinking about how to turn the situation into a political advantage.

GET RID OF THE CABAL

MICHAEL RATNER, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights commented to IPA:

“Until we get rid of the entire cabal, which includes Bush and Cheney, that has engaged in torture, off-shore prisons such as Guantanamo, violations of the Geneva Conventions and warrantless wiretapping, there is little to celebrate in Gonzales’ resignation. Guantanamo continues, as does torture, wiretapping, secret CIA sites, rendition, and illegal trials. Impeachment and prosecution of the authors and facilitators of these violations of fundamental rights is imperative and our Democratic Congress has fallen down on the job.”

IS CHERTOFF IN THE WINGS?

And who will replace him. Top on the list of possibles or should we call them suspects is former Judge Michael Chertoff. Wouldn’t that be just perfect—a promotion for the man who mishandled Katrina on the second anniversary of the government enabled caastrophe. Here’s a story you may have heard about him.

IN THE WAR NEWS

Rolling Stone Magazine: The Great Iraq Swindle

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury.

Noam Chomsky: Options On The Table

The sabre-rattling rhetoric about “containing Iran” has escalated to the point where both political parties and practically the whole US Press corps accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honourable, that “all options are on the table,” to quote the leading presidential candidates - possibly even nuclear

MORE ON THOSE VIETAM PARALLELS

MUST READ: Larry Beinhart who wrote the novel Wag The Dog and other books writes

Larry Beinhart writes for Alternet, “George Bush and other Iraq War supporters have argued that if we withdraw from Iraq the result will be like the killing fields of Cambodia - an odd comparison considering that the US has direct responsibility for that holocaust.”

How does the insurgency fund its campaign?

Iraqi Insurgents Taking Cut of US Rebuilding Money

Hannah Allam reports for McClatchy Newspapers, “Iraq’s deadly insurgent groups have financed their war against US troops in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars in US rebuilding funds that they’ve extorted from Iraqi contractors in Anbar province.”

Harvery Wasserman, long time anti-nuclear campaign writes: “Astonishing tower collapse screams “No New Nukes!!”

A cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant has collapsed.

A broken 54″ pipe there has spewed 350,000 gallons per minute of contaminated, overheated water into the Earth. “The river water piping and the series of screens and supports failed,” said a company spokesman. They “fell to the ground.”

The public and media were barred from viewing the wreckage for three days. But when a Congressional Energy Bill conference committee takes up Senate-approved loan guarantees for building new nukes this fall, what will reactor backers say about this latest pile of radioactive rubble?

This kind of event can make even hardened nuke opponents pinch themselves and read the descriptions twice. Who could make this up?

Vermont Yankee has been in operation—more or less—since the early 1970s. Its owner is Entergy, a multi-reactor “McNuke” operator that last year got approval to up VY’s output by 20%.

Required inspections revealed worrisome cracks and other structural problems. Entergy dismissed all that, but was forced to issue a “ratepayer protection policy” against incidents caused by the power increase. The guarantee expired earlier this month, not long before the collapse.

REPUG SENATOR BUSTED IN MEN’S ROOM

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.

Craig’s arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8.

A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding,” and said the office would release a fuller statement later Monday afternoon.