Letters to the Editor
Frank Smith, Bluff City, KS
Published Letters: 161 Editor's Choice: 15
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A "chance:" What you give the zero batting average Little League kid warming the end of the bench.
[Read the article: "The decision's been made ... to give another person a chance"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You only give that kid a chance because you're twenty runs ahead or behind in the fifth inning and his parents bought the team uniforms.
Leahy suggested, plausibly, that Brad "I can't recall" Schlozman might be out to beat Gonzales' record for memory failure on the stand.
The White House/Justice Department was massaging the Missouri race as hard as it could because Sen. Jim Talent was being given a serious challenge by eventual winner Claire McCaskill. She prevailled by one of the closest margins in 2006. The ACORN indictments were meant to intimidate late registrants signed up by their hired gatherers. But as the "D"s on the Judiciary Committee pointed out, ACORN had come forward and put the finger on four gatherers, who were paid per signature, and there was no legitimate reason to prosecute before the election. Lots of frightened people had called to ask if they could vote.
No "R"s showed for the hearing so it was just Leahy, Feingold, Feinstein, Whitehouse and Schumer. They all acquited themselves admirably.
It was also pointed out in testimony that the civil rights division actually appeared to be deliberately hindering minority voting, with its decision about Georgia and Minnesota situations. It wouldn't intervene when reservation Indians had no I.D. other than tribal documents to present when voting and the Secretary of State tried to disenfranchise them. That flies in the face of Native American sovereignty. The courts later found the division had taken illegal action in Georgia. So the civil rights division became a civil rights offender.
Criminal and disgraceful, but typical Bush/Rove/Gonzales stunts.
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This rotten apple hasn't fallen far from the tree...
[Read the article: Why did Bush commute Libby's sentence?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the grand tradition of the Bush family, the boy has spared himself by sparing others. On Christmas Eve, 1992, his father pardoned “…Elliott Abrams, Duane R. Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George, Robert C. McFarlane, and Caspar W. Weinberger for all offenses charged or prosecuted by Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh.” That degenerate crew stole, lied to Congress, shredded documents to cover their crimes, and unleashed and maintained an illegal, genocidal war against peasants and Indians, educators and clerics in Central America. They made secret deals with terrorists and hostage takers in Iran in order to raise “off the books” funding for their criminal enterprise, “Iran-Contra.” They ran cocaine from Columbia on CIA planes to augment those resources.
By commuting the sentence of I. Lewis Libby, Bush once again reiterated the principle that he and those close to him, Dick Cheney in particular, are not only above the law, but that their behavior exists in a separate universe from the law.
This commutation insured that the Bush regency will never be held accountable for the deaths of upwards of a million Iraqis, for almost 3,600 young Americans so far, for the illegal invasion of and destruction of a country that posed no threat to us, for plunging it into an eminently predictable civil war. Bush gave notice that no presidential critic shall remain unpunished, that anyone who exposes his lies is fair game for his corruption of justice. He is clearly more dangerous and irresponsible than was Saddam himself.
Let no one think that this commutation was inspired by any shred of decency or humanity that the president might profess to share for those in less privileged positions than himself.
We should best remember Karla Faye Tucker, whose transformation from a heartless criminal to a person who had accepted responsibility for her crimes and accepted the Savior that Bush himself claims to admire, was dramatically ridiculed by Dubya. Transformed by 14 years on death row she only pled that she be allowed to spend the rest of her life in prison.
Bush ignored the pleas made on her behalf for clemency by the Pope, by the World Council of Churches, by Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich. According to biographer Tucker Carlson, asked what Karla might say were she to meet him as her execution grew near, Bush smirked and mimicked what she had told Larry King: “Please,” Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don't kill me.”
Make no mistake. This is but one more milepost along the path of the most disgusting, mendacious, reckless and unlawful administration in the history of the United States.