Here we go again; more political agenda masquerading as public outrage with cheaply framed ham-fisted watchdog techniques. As boring and antiquated as James Madison’s smear campaign against John Adams during the 1800 presidential campaign against his boss, Thomas Jefferson, its methods reek of American tradition, often misunderstood in its time by neophytes and professional chicken littles as uncharted calamitous abuse of power, treason and other grade-school malarkey passed off as editorial comment.
This week another in the long line of innocuous watchdog groups, made legitimate merely by its Internet presence, decided to take on the Justice Department for its failure to release all nine names of lawyers hired by the federal government despite their history of defending members of al Qaeda, in so doing ostensibly putting into question their patriotic loyalty. An ad run on YouTube by Keep America Safe, founded by so-called journalist and full-time whiner, William Kristol and the unfortunate offspring of the polluted Cheney genes named Liz, strongly suggested a cover-up, neatly dubbed The Al Qaeda 7.
Ignoring the fact that these idiots vehemently defended the first president to suffer a significant attack on two major American cities by foreign intruders since the War of 1812, Keep American Safe has every right to besmirch the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder by calling into question the legitimacy of its federal employees. Its members and founders are American citizens, and as such pay their salaries. They deserve, as we all do, the transparency of our government, its agendas, and its effect on its citizenry. Transparency or bust! I get it.
The problems with this half-assed ad hominem attack begin to emerge when you consider the fact that just four short years ago the KAS founders argued tooth-and-nail the right for then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to dismiss over two dozen federal attorneys on political and not performance grounds. And when pressed on the issue of the highly unconstitutional Patriot Act, run rather illegally by the very same Justice Department they are now criticizing, with its fancy spying on American citizens, again, a stringent defense on the grounds of, get this, national security.
Whew, the hypocrisy meter just busted. Let’s pause to adjust the sucker and continue if we can keep the laughter to a minimum.
All of a sudden transparency is tantamount, whereas before it was something close to treason to suggest the government tell us what the hell it’s doing. Nifty.
Oh, and by the way, it is important to point out at this juncture in the rant that anyone can and has uncovered the names of these lawyers merely by surfing the Web.
And lest we forget the steaming pile of hypocrisy offered up by the other side, we now have scores of liberals up in arms that anyone, never mind conservative axe-grinders, dare question the integrity of the Justice Department, which was rightfully battered for years during the scarred Nixon and Reagan administrations.
Questionable backgrounds of lawyers? Shit, this is tidily winks for the Justice Department, the home of the most heinous rogues to ever chair a position of power in the guise of law enforcement, offering a gaggle of attorney generals so completely undaunted by such nonsense as constitutional rule their names and deeds echo terror in the hearts of those unlucky to remember.
In my lifetime alone we have the president’s little brother, Bobby Kennedy, who not only sat on the assistant counsel of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under the drunken monster that was Joseph McCarthy, but also had the audacity to take the mob to task after its machinations put him and big bro in power in the first place. Then there is the always hilarious lying to the Soviets about the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey whilst the entire eastern seaboard of the United States stood in peril. Oh, and who can forget the always fun-loving John Mitchell, who not only fought to enforce civil rights laws in the South and sought conspiracy charges against protestors of the Viet Nam War, but also merrily bankrolled Dick Nixon’s multi-million dollar domestic spying, smear and surveillance schemes before being shuffled off to prison.
Why stop there?
The legend that is Edwin Meese III, whose murderously ill-conceived crackdown on student protestors in Berkeley as then Governor Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff made him the perfect dupe for the bungling crimes of Iran-Contra, which only succeeded his unlocking the door for the social conservative movement that summarily wrecked the Republican Party and allowed a bunch of voodoo men to gain power over the ensuing decades.
And there’s barely any space left to discuss Janet Reno’s massacre of lunatics in Waco, Texas with a war-time arsenal of tanks and bombs, John Ashcroft’s post-9/11 use of the FBI as some weirdly formed Gestapo with a questionably legal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the sacked Operation TIPS that is so incredibly criminal it is far too complicated to detail here.
Business as usual.
Then there is the question of why any member of a terrorist cabal, especially a non-citizen, has a right to an attorney under U.S. law, which this space has already weighed in on more than once. To summarize: Anyone with a lust for martyrdom fueled by religious fantasy to destroy property, life and limb, has—by any reasonable estimation—officially checked out of society anyway, U.S. or otherwise. Fuck them.
But the thing is we can’t really “fuck them,” because whether Left or Right, America must stand for a rule of law or we as a nation, as a people, would be no more civilized than the bleating scum who aim to tear us down. Even if these wretched sons of excrement were tried in a military court, which some argue is better than a civil setting, representation must be provided, and assuming these attorneys are American citizens, they would have to be present. Does this make them terrorists? Does it make them sympathize with terrorists?
You see, Keep America Safe is just another “group” that has to find another “group” to paint with a broad brush as “evil” or “wrong” to justify the standing of their group, just as John Adams’s enemies painted him as a backstabbing Tory for his defense of British soldiers following the infamous Boston Massacre, perhaps the one incident that cemented in the minds of the colonists a spark of revolution; a revolution, mind you, championed as no other by Mr. Adams.
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of Deep Tank Jersey, Fear No Art, Trailing Jesus, and Midnight For Cinderella. jamescampion.com.
