These wingnuts are just getting warmed up. That was self-evident yesterday on Fox, when not just Glenn Beck, but Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly piled on as well. These guys are now headed straight for the rest of Obama's progressive appointees, and ultimately are after Obama himself.
Beck had on Michelle Malkin to help him line up the next row of victims, who appear primarily to be John Holdren and Valerie Jarrett. Hannity, too, clearly has Jarrett in his sights; he featured a clip from her chat at Netroots Nation, talking up the value of having someone like Van Jones in the administration.
But really, this bus isn't just aimed at progressive appointees. It's directed ultimately at Obama himself. Beck made that clear in his segment with O'Reilly (who miraculously comes off as the voice of reason in all this), when he essentially admitted that the purpose of this whole campaign is to paint Obama as a closet Marxist who secretly wants to transform America into a communist state.
In other words, this is about delegitimizing the Obama presidency. That's been their purpose from Day One, and they appear to be right on schedule. With a helping hand from the Obama White House itself.
I will say here that I'm no more optimistic that Hillary Clinton's response would have been any different. The nature of power is such that one can always find a strong enough argument for retaining it "just in case" once it's been exercised. But then again, Clinton wasn't the one who sold herself to us on the basis of a new transparent era, either:
A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.
The administration's discussion of Wilson's link to the CIA was meant to undermine criticism by her husband of administration allegations that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium, a matter that her husband had probed for the CIA, according to testimony presented in a 2007 trial.
A list of at least seven related conversations involving Cheney appears in a new court filing approved by Obama appointees at the Justice Department. In the filing, the officials argue that the substance of what Cheney told special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in 2004 must remain secret.
No such agreement was reached between Fitzgerald and Cheney at the time of their chat, according to a 2008 Fitzgerald letter to lawmakers. But the Bush administration rejected requests by Congress and a nonprofit group for access to two FBI accounts of the conversation, saying the material was exempt from disclosure under subpoena or the Freedom of Information Act.
The Obama administration has since agreed that the material should not be disclosed. A Justice Department lawyer at one point last month argued that vice presidents and other White House officials will decline to be interviewed in the future if they know their remarks might "get on 'The Daily Show' " or be used as fodder for political enemies.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan expressed doubt about that argument. To counter Sullivan's skepticism, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a supporting affidavit to the new court filing that the department needs the ability to interview White House officials informally in future law enforcement investigations, and that if the Cheney interview summaries are made public, "there is an increased likelihood that such officials could feel reluctant to participate." Breuer served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater probe.
The nonprofit group pushing for disclosure, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, responded yesterday with a statement that the Justice Department has subpoenaed such officials without difficulty in the past. "It is astonishing that a top Department of Justice political appointee is suggesting other high-level appointees are unlikely to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement investigations. What is wrong with this picture?" said Melanie Sloan, head of the group.
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Anyone notice how right-wing behavior toward President Obama so far is mimicking, structurally speaking, their behavior toward President Clinton in the 1990s: encourage anti-government hysteria, freak out about incipient totalitarianism, accuse him of destroying the country and making it weaker, and then constantly attack his appointees and demand their firing? What's next, an investigation of his investments?
Does it surprise anyone, then, that the first object of Republicans' ire -- the first Cabinet appointment whose resignation they're demanding -- would be a woman named Janet?
Greta Van Susteren and Byron York last night on Fox were fairly representative (check out the Limbaugh rant at the beginning), though the fire-Napolitano talk has been bubbling up everywhere. As Amanda Terkel notes this morning, John McCain even went so far as to falsely claim that the person responsible for the report had been fired.
Still, as York says, the cold reality is that Napolitano is on perfectly solid ground and there is no likelihood, imminent or otherwise, that she'll be forced out. But the reason for that is that not only was what the report said in fact perfectly accurate, she only bears glancing responsibility for it: It had, after all, been commissioned by the Bush administration and authored by Bush administration hirees.
On holdover appointees from the Bush days, here is one that ought to get everyone on the phone to their member of Congress and the White House right now ---
Did you know that Panetta has kept John Rizzo as Acting CIA General Counsel? If you look at the newly released Justice Department memos, they were all addressed to John Rizzo. Truly unbelievable that he is still in charge of legal advice at the CIA.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone involved in memos penned by Jay ByBee and Steven Bradbury should not be working for the Obama administration.
I googled Rizzo's name and found this post from Marcy:
The OLC, which is a component of the Justice Department, was created to provide objective legal advice to the Attorney General and to resolve legal disputes among federal agencies. During the Bush administration, however, the OLC became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law. Some of these memos have become public through leaks to the media and through the ACLU's litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. But most of them are still secret.
The White House on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of John A. Rizzo to become the Central Intelligence Agency’s top lawyer amid mounting opposition from Democrats over his role in the harsh interrogation of C.I.A. detainees. The nomination of the 32-year agency veteran to become general counsel is the most prominent casualty of the partisan fight over the spy agency’s program of detaining and questioning top terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks.
--
Mr. Rizzo has been the C.I.A’s acting general counsel on and off for most of the past six years, including the period in 2002 when the Bush administration was constructing a legal foundation for the agency’s then-secret detention and interrogation program.
At a Senate hearing in June, Democrats pressed Mr. Rizzo about whether he agreed with a 2002 Justice Department memorandum that gave legal guidance to the C.I.A. program. The memorandum argued that nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture.
The memorandum was issued in response to a request from the agency to authorize a slate of interrogation techniques to be used in secret jails abroad. Among the techniques was one known as waterboarding, a method that induced a feeling of drowning. Mr. Rizzo said in June that he raised no objections at the time to the Justice Department opinion but said that he now believed it was “overbroad for the issue that it was intended to cover.”
He's still the "acting counsel" because Stephen Preston has not been confirmed yet. There needs to be some heavy scrutiny on Rizzo and fast.
Murray Waas has a fascinating piece in the new Atlantic about Dan Bogden, the onetime U.S. Attorney from Nevada who got shoved out by the Rove Crew:
A Justice Department official told me that the idea of hiring Bogden back is in fact a real possibility, and said that the White House counsel’s office has been quietly vetting his background in anticipation of his possible reappointment—not a difficult task, considering that he has been employed by the government for the majority of his adult life.
If Bogden is reappointed as U.S. attorney, his supervisor will be one of the authors of the Justice Department’s report on the U.S. attorney firings that praised Bogden and severely criticized the Bush administration appointees who fired him. Last Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder reassigned H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, to head the executive office of U.S. attorneys, where he will oversee the nation’s 94 U.S. attorneys. By naming Jarrett to his new position, a senior Obama administration official told me, “I think this administration is sending a message that the era of politicization of the Department should be long due over.” The same official told me: “The continued service of Dan Bogden might hopefully send the same message.”
Slowly but surely, the men whose careers were ruined by Rove and the Gang are being restored, at least incrementally. David Iglesias, the fired New Mexico U.S. Attorney, has been working on Guantanamo cases for the Navy's JAG unit.
