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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

When men put country over king
Posted by Jill | 7:40 AM
It isn't easy to stand up to the Bush Junta. Many have tried, and have either turned up conveniently dead or had their careers destroyed. When we wonder why would-be rebellious Republicans and the so-called opposition cave into a president with a 30% approval rating again and again and again, you have to wonder just what is being threatened.

David Iglesias used to be regarded as an up-and-comer by the Bush justice department. Here is a guy who was involved in the military hazing case that became the film A Few Good Men. But he learned recently what happens when you dare to cross the Bush Family and their own personal Paulie Walnuts, Karl Rove.

Iglesias isn't going quietly, though:

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

[snip]

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a “diverse up and comer” in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)

When some of my fired colleagues — Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas; Paul Charlton of Phoenix; H. E. Cummins III of Little Rock, Ark.; Carol Lam of San Diego; and John McKay of Seattle — and I testified before Congress on March 6, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. Not only had we not been insulated from politics, we had apparently been singled out for political reasons. (Among the Justice Department’s released documents is one describing the office of Senator Domenici as being “happy as a clam” that I was fired.)

As this story has unfolded these last few weeks, much has been made of my decision to not prosecute alleged voter fraud in New Mexico. Without the benefit of reviewing evidence gleaned from F.B.I. investigative reports, party officials in my state have said that I should have begun a prosecution. What the critics, who don’t have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible — namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.

What’s more, their narrative has largely ignored that I was one of just two United States attorneys in the country to create a voter-fraud task force in 2004. Mine was bipartisan, and it included state and local law enforcement and election officials.

After reviewing more than 100 complaints of voter fraud, I felt there was one possible case that should be prosecuted federally. I worked with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s public integrity section. As much as I wanted to prosecute the case, I could not overcome evidentiary problems. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. did not disagree with my decision in the end not to prosecute.


But Karl Rove did, because the Rove modus operandi is to win elections by any means necessary, as Digby notes here. And in fact, the entire prosecutor purge may be the result of Karl Rove's tantrum that the fired prosecutors put the rule of law ahead of serving the King.

Last night I watched the first episode of The Tudors, the new series on Showtime that is certainly unlike any other Henry VIII telling you've ever seen. We're used to seeing big, brawny, loud, larger-than-life guys like Robert Shaw, Brendan Gleeson Ray Winstone, Keith Michell and Charles Laughton play the much-married monarch. But this telling is different. Forgetting for a moment about the frequent, explicit-for-cable, bodice-ripping sex, this series, which features the unlikely casting of the dissolute-looking Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as a young Henry, portrays a spoiled, impetuous, war-seeking monarch like George W. Bush only with Bill Clinton's libido. Like Bush, this Henry is surrounded by ambitious sycophants like Sam Neill's terrifically corrupt Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, with Jeremy Northam's suprisingly effective Sir Thomas More serving as the King's Conscience (and we all know already where THAT got him).

The whole things is deliriously and deliciously over-the-top, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness -- as when Henry lustily splits and greedily devours the insides of a juicy pomegranate right before no doubt similarly devouring one of his wife's chambermaids. But when you listen to the dialogue about the advisability of war, and look at the men feeding this king's lust for battle, there's no doubt of whom the scriptwriters were thinking when they wrote this script.

The story of Henry VIII is one of those historical events, like the sinking of the Titanic, that is timeless and always relevant, as well as being one of which we never tire. But even all these years on, no one has yet written a revisiionist history claiming that Sir Thomas More was the bad guy and that Henry VIII was right to cut off his head. But the royalist Bush family and their Republican lackeys have learned nothing from their British history, and they continue to make the same mistake of believing that history looks kindly on those who persecute the righteous.

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