Oaf of Office

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to give the current whitewash version of the President’s massive program to spy on his (domestic) political enemies under the catch-all of “protecting us from dark skinned terrrrrrrrorists.”
Let’s not mince words: there is now no doubt that the President and his minions have decided to spy on a massive number of Americans in a program that is almost designed to be ineffective at intercepting actual terrrorists, certainly when viewed in the context of this WaPo report noting that of an estimated 5,000 Americans spied on, “the program” yielded less than ten suspects; for you sticklers, that’s around 2/10 of one per cent, a return that would fail the definition of “probable cause.”
Indeed, given this kind of a “success” ratio, given the man-hours of law enforcement personnel to run down false “leads” generated by such an intrusive, yet ineffective, “program,” inefficiency alone is a reason to shut it down (its kind of like our invasion of Iraq; yes, a formerly contained irritant, Saddam Hussein is gone, but we are less well able to deal with other threats, such as a possibly nuclear armed Iran and North Korea… not to mention, we have destabilized Iraq itself… but there you go…), even if it did not constitute a massive incursion in the privacy and general civil rights of American citizens.
But hey, that’s just me.
Anyway, Gonzales, who bizarrely was not sworn in, essentially gave the Committee nothing of value, and reiterated as a mantra that the President has intrinsic authority handed to him by God Himself to override the rest of the Constitution in “wartime,” which God Himself also gave the President the power to declare that we are in. Forever.
The fact is, former A.G. Ashcroft believed there were limits to executive power that stop at some point before “dictatorship” (not necessarily far from it, but before it). Gonzales has no such belief. It’s my own fault, really. I once suggested that it would be damned near impossible for Bush to find someone for A.G. who was worse than John Ashcroft.
When talking about the Bush Administration, one must simply not make statements like that. Ever.