House of Cards

Ok, so in ring one of this circus we have Al Gonzales dancing as fast as he can. He has to put on a good show, lest someone notice that only the President can fire federal attorneys. Which means that either the President knew what was going on, has no clue (maybe he thought he was cancelling a delivery of broccoli to the White House), or that the attorneys were fired illegally. None of these is good. As distasteful as it is that after all the things Mr. Gonzales has said and done, it turns out that 8 politically motivated terminations are the one unnacceptable thing in the bipartisan eyes of the Senate. But wait, it gets better! It turns out that this may be a puppet show, with none other than everyone’s favorite crony, Karl Rove pulling the strings from a remote email account. Why is that important? Because if he’d used a whitehouse.gov email account, it would be archived and available on subpoena. So now, everybody wants to get to the bottom of this situation. And that means somebody *cough cough that would be you, Mr. Rove* has to testify before Congress. Not just the Senate. The House of Representatives too. Needless to say the White House doesn’t like that idea one bit. They may have very little bargaining room, as now it seems Mr. Gonzales may have lied to Congress.

Meanwhile in ring two we have the Iraq War. The darn thing is getting ready to have a 4th anniversary, sad as that is to say, and it’s not quite as popular as it was when it was younger. The President is having to spend time and energy defending it, “plead[ing] for patience” and giving us dire, dire warnings about what might happen if we were to stop pouring money down that bottomless pit and support our troops by bringing them home. Be afraid! Be very afraid! I fear that our capacity for fear was drained by years of Department of Homeland Security look out oh wait it’s nothing warnings. It is no coincidence that suddenly reports are coming out of our professional torture chambers that the enemy combatants we have in custody have confessed to everything short of funding John Wilkes Booth (yes folks, that last link is satire). If this isn’t enough to discredit the practice of torture, what more do we need? War is hell, we have lost a lot of lives on both sides, and we have lost a lot of money.

It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the third ring of this circus. It’s totally dark. And even though it’s hard to tell in the dark, it may be covered by a big tarp. And in fact to be perfectly honest, all the things that we are pretty sure we know happened there happened years ago now. But it sure looks like certain people in the administration are doing everything they can to keep the War on Terra rolling. For example, The Taliban offered to send Osama Bin Laden to a neutral country presumably for trial back in October of 2001. If we really wanted justice, the international courts are the place. Seriously, you won’t find an impartial jury here in the United States. Surely the Hague could have helped us out on this one. And then we have the Vice President. It seems that various parties may have been working out of Mr. Cheney’s office to “us[e] stolen funds from Iraq to arm al Qaeda-tied groups and foment a larger Sunni-Shia war…” It was specifically done this way — the author alleges — to avoid the problems of CIA involvement that brought the Iran-Contra scandal to public attention.

If nothing here rises to the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, what does it take?

In closing: compare and contrast; credit card tricks; credit card tips (hey, I can be fair and balanced too!); a car that’s supposed to be a little fishy; when it comes to TV, “[T]orture is the new sex”; and finally, a big plane we don’t need.