Oh, hey, here's a surprise: The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday recommended Michael Mukasey's confirmation as Attorney General.
Mukasey, of course, is the guy who maintained a straight face as he told the senate he was unfamiliar with the practice of water-boarding. Given the post-Abu Ghraib heightened awareness of torture in all its forms, Mukasey's claim is simply unbelievable.
Or, to put it more succinctly, he's lying.
The guy needed to bring a sense of, well, justice to the Justice Department has already failed the only conceivable test of his worth. Yet somehow he gets a big okey-doke, and his confirmation by the full senate is pretty much a lock.
Two influential Democrats helped Mukasey along, Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein. Schumer's from New York, Feinstein from California--supposedly hard-core Blue States, yet their top senators have no problem blowing a big wet kiss to the Bushinistas. (Incidentally, please not my substitution of "big wet kiss" for the usual oral sex metaphor I would normally deploy here. I'm trying to learn restraint...) Nobody would expect otherwise from Feinstein (on the San Francisco political scene, she used to run with George Moscone and Harvey Milk; once she became a career politician, her views more closely resembled Dan White's), but Schumer was the first senator to call for Alberto Gonzales' resignation; you'd think he'd demand better from Gonzales' replacement.
You would think that, if you honestly believed the Democratic party actually stood for something, had any kind of spine, offered something other than mild, token opposition to the most anti-humanistic presidency imaginable. Such thoughts might have been possible once.
Things have changed.
