Between the bailout, Palin's unbelievable ineptness, and sleezy character assassinations, it is easy to forget everything else going wrong. I need periodic reminders myself.
This week's Nation offers just such a reminder: "Justice, Bush-Style" by Andrew Gumbel is about how republican loyalists have taken over the Department of Justice and taken aim at the civil rights division.
(Update: link to entire article: http://www.thenation.com/... Sorry, I have it delivered as an actual paper document. I didn't think to try to find it online when first posting this.)
The article sums up everything I've been hearing off and on from a variety of sources -- BushCo has systematically chased a way competent lawyers from with good legal training and hired hacks of right wing legal schools like Regent University School of Law:
The devastation has been profound. Bush loyalists have crammed key positions and even rank-and-file trial lawyer posts with unqualified conservative ideologues interested only in carrying water for the White House. They have put people with little litigation experience in charge of litigating sections; they have rejected top candidates from Harvard, Yale and Stanford and favored an improbable number of alumni from the Regent University School of Law, a conservative Christian school founded by Pat Robertson.
Not that we are surprised, but it appears BushCo is emphatically attacking civil rights and voting rights. On civil rights:
The civil rights division has been the prime target because it has a direct influence on the conduct of elections -- and because minority voters skew so heavily towards the Democrats. But the culture of politicization has pervaded the whole department, turning it into little more than a rubber stamp for the White House on hugely controversial constitutional issues, from warrantless wiretapping to the definition of torture.
It goes on to say this sparked racial tensions and accusation of discrimination; a complete disregard for the old way-too-liberal-for-the-Bush-regime employees. Many have resigned.
Then voting rights:
It was March 2001, just a few weeks after George W. Bush took office, and Ashcroft had a big announcement to make. He was launching a new voting rights initiative, under which a beefed-up voting section would monitor elections more closely and crack down on suspected instances of fraud. This idea did not come from [Joe] Rich, thouGh he then headed up the voting rights section. In fact, he was not even told about the initiative until twenty minutes before Ashcroft announced it to the media.
Ashcroft's key aide at that time was Mark Metcalf, a failed Congressional candidate from Kentucky, who shared his view that if more Republicans did not win elections it was at least partly because they were being cheated out of them. Metcalf soon gave way to Hans von Spakovsky, a Georgia lawyer who had been part of the Voting Integrity Project, a group that produced the notorious, error riddled felon purge list in Florida for the 2000 election, which disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of eligible African-American voters. Spakovsky, who left the department in 2005, waas awarded a job as a consultant to the Commission on Civil Rights."
I'm torn between absolute disbelief and riotous amusement that the republicans think they lose because elections aren't fair. Is that because they believe blacks should still only get 3/5 a vote? It is about like that now, isn't it?