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Noone spits on the grave of a dead man, never mind whatever he did in his lifetime. Equally the members of the Bush administration are taking the leave before they get thrown out of office. In the light of the resignation of attorney general Alberto Gonzales¹ one should hope, they don’t get away that easily.

It’s one thing to admit a wrong-doing and resigning because of it, but it’s a totally different thing to resign having done so much bad and then get away without even having to apologize and - one has to think - get a nice out-of-office gift from one of the firms, you’ve been forcefully supporting the past few years in office..

Doing tricks

A memento that should stop our hearts of beating for a second is the level of expectation that everyone has about the resignation and the finding of a new attorney general in the US:

Judged by the standards of our history, a recess appointment to replace Alberto Gonzales sounds like an incredible proposition. But don’t be so sure. Just as we saw with the ‘pardon scooter’ movement, the word seems already to have gone out to the folks on the right to start preparing the ground for just such a move by the president. I’ve already heard a few just this morning saying it would be the right thing for the president to do. Watch for it.

Apparently fiddling with and abusing the law has become the new standard in US politics. Everybody expects it - and why shouldn’t we: the bush administration - but not only them - has given us the necessary grounds to expect these kind of moves every single second. The last big slap in the face of everyone who has been counting on the rule of law was the pardoning of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who leaked the identity of CIA-Agent Valerie Plame assumingly because her husband Joseph Wilson was criticizing the iraq war. He was pardoned by George W. Bush only days after being finally indicted..

Alberto Gonzales himself is one of the best examples of how law can be bent - and violated if necessary - to achieve the ‘greater political good’.

During his service as White House counsel from 2001 to 2005 and later as attorney general, Gonzales wrote a memo saying that anti-torture laws and the Geneva Convention could be waived for some prisoners. He approved or oversaw the drafting of rules for war tribunals that limited the rights of prisoners, and he pushed for expanded government power to engage in domestic spying.

…

He approved or supported Bush policies on the secret detention of terrorism suspects, the practice of “extraordinary rendition” under which prisoners were transferred to countries known to engage in torture and the use of the military system to hold prisoners indefinitely without access to due process under U.S. law.

The article Gonzales’ legacy: moral, legal woes at Justice Dept. counts several morally indefensible actions that Gonzales’ signed off and i do guess there are more.

Political dualism

But the other interesting thing about Gonzales’ resignation is that all that didn’t get him out of office. No water-boarding, no guantanamization of US-politics, no secret CIA prisons, no domestic spying - nothing apparently was big enough to force Gonzales out of office until the whole affair with the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. The questioning in this matter hasn’t ended yet, but most likely the nine attorneys have been fired for political reasons and this got the democrats jumping like a bee had stung them.. It seems the only thing that real is working in the USA is the drive of the two main political parties for power.

I’m not saying, that the firing of US attorneys for political reasons is a misdemeanor. Bringing governmental departments (and officials working there) into line plays a big role in the creation of a fascist state and any hint of this happening should be checked and retraced and the culprits should be prosecuted. But compared to water-boarding practices, spying and other horrific policy justifications that the attorney general should be answering for this is really a rather smallish brick in the wall.

1. but also considering what corpses Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld have on their consciences [↩]