lundi 8 décembre 2008

Here's how badly the wingnuts want history to repeat itself

Remember how the wingnuts got all up in arms over the White House travel office firings at the beginning of the Clinton administration? That was the beginning of the so-called "Clinton Scandals", which led to the Whitewater investigation (which yielded nothing) and its tentacles, culminating in the impeachment of a president for lying about a blowjob.

That ill-advised impeachment is the main reason George W. Bush is still in office after committing what in a sane world would be high crimes by anyone's definition, other than the most confirmed Bush cultists.

If anyone thought that conservatives wouldn't try to set up the next Democratic president by making him go out of the gate with some kind of trumped-up, bogus "scandal", guess again. Because one of the worst Bushista U.S. Attorneys has no intention of stepping down, even though it is customary for U.S. attorneys to vacate their posts when a new administration comes in:

Just last month, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Buchanan’s reign was expected to end. Indeed, when a new president is elected, U.S. attorneys of both parties generally submit their resignations to make way for the new appointees. But Buchanan has other plans:

Despite a new administration coming into power, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said she plans to stick around.


“It doesn’t serve justice for all the U.S. attorneys to submit their resignations all at one time,” she said yesterday. […]


More than that, she said she would consider working in the Obama administration. She would not discuss what her future might hold beyond the U.S. attorney’s office.


“I am open to considering further service to the United States,” Ms. Buchanan said.


She’s been described by colleagues as the quintessential loyal Bushie. “She is very focused to the department first of all,” said one assistant U.S. attorney, who asked not to be named. “She’s not independent, and I don’t think she wants to be.”


During her tenure, Buchanan has been criticized for bringing politically-motivated investigations and charges against politicians in Western Pennsylvania, none more famous than the public corruption case against a local high-profile Democrat Dr. Cyril H. Wecht. Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh told Congress that the Wecht prosecution is “not the type of case normally constituting a federal ‘corruption’ case brought against a local official.”


Buchanan hired Monica Goodling, and she hand-picked a Pittsburgh attorney to serve as the U.S. prosecutor in Alaska, going over the heads of Sens. Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski. She also had a peripheral role in the U.S. attorney scandal:

[snip]

Buchanan “has been criticized because her office has brought a number of high-profile cases against Democrats during her tenure, but rarely targeted members of her own party.”


Does she really expect us to believe that she's staying on out of concern for an overload of paperwork on clerical workers at the Justice Department? No, she's going to hang around so that when Republicans and Joe Lieberman decide that no Democrat should ever be allowed to deal with the crises facing this country and that it's more important to remove him than to do the nation's business. Buchanan will be right there, loaded for bear.

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