The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Ghosts of Wingnuts Past

Get out your Tamagotchis and your Trapper Keepers, kids, because Congressional Republicans have announced they’re taking us all on a field trip to the 1990s!  As part of Eric Holder’s confirmation hearings for the post of Attorney General, we’ll enjoy a special guided tour of the Marc Rich pardon and the Elian Gonzalez affair, then it’s off to the cafeteria for a lunch of Mentos and Zima, and a quick visit to the Gift Shop for Special Limited Edition Beanie Babies and Koosh Balls.  But wait!  Museum of Poutrage docent Lisa Fabrizio insists that before we go, we simply must take in their latest exhibit:  The “Barack Obama is an Accessory to the Murder of Terri Schiavo” Pavilion.  Presented by Monsanto.
As the year 2008 winds down and President Bush’s days in office draw to a close, liberals all over the world are celebrating the Iraq shoe-throwing incident. But this only illustrates that the Bush’s efforts in Iraq have proved a tremendous success, given that a member of the Iraqi press has managed to outdo even Western media types who, despite their best efforts, have never laid a glove on W.
So he’s the Bush now?  Like Richard the Lionheart, Ethelred the Unready, and Charles the Bald, we must now address the president as George the Bush?  I don’t necessarily object, but it’s going to create a lot of extra work for his bomber jacket and windbreaker embroiderers.
However, just in time for the holidays, the liberal media have received a Fitzmas present, though not of the sort for which they wished. No, after years of beating the Bushes for a chance to take down the 43rd president of the United States, they find themselves in the position of having to defend one of their own, via the Blagojevich pay-for-play scandal and the Obama Administration’s alleged involvement therein.
I’m not a freelance columnist for a prominent website like RenewAmerica, and thus unqualified to render a legal judgment, but in order for the “Obama Administration” to have “alleged involvement” with a scandal, doesn’t there first have to technically be an Obama Administration, and then, doesn’t someone need to actually make an allegation against  it?  I mean, apart from Patrick Fitzgerald’s statements exonerating Obama and his staff, the tapes themselves seem to indicate that Blagojevich wasn’t getting paid to play.  So it appears that Ms. Fabrizio is really offering us less of a Fitzmas and more of a Fabmas present, which is great, because I’ve been wondering what to get my gay friends this year.
And in a seemingly unrelated matter…
…but which is really connected, because as we learned from our jaunt in the WayBack Machine to the 1990s, “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” unless there actually wasn’t a crime or a cover-up, in which case it’s the “seemingly unrelated matter,” which allows an inquiry into a fraudulent real estate deal which predated a President’s term of office to morph into the Vince Foster suicide inquest cum murder investigation, which turned into an exposé of hanky panky on company time, which exploded into an impeachment trial, which left nothing behind but the great smell of Brut, and the charred remains of a failed investigation into a fraudulent real estate deal which now both predated and outlasted a President’s term of office, which left us, ultimately, with a weird hybrid of 19th century literature and 21st century media, featuring Ken Starr as Javert, remorselessly trying the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, except with less sharp, but compassionate social criticism and more crusty semen stains.
…we have learned that the “office” of President-Elect has swelled its crimson tide by tapping Harvard chum Thomas Perrelli for its Justice Department transition team. Now, what does the Blago flap have to do with Perrelli’s presence on the Obama team?
Both Perrelli and Blagojevich have a Bacon Number of 3?
For those who remember the Terri Schiavo case, Mr. Perrelli was one of a team of lawyers representing Michael Schiavo’s efforts to end the life of that defenseless woman. Mr. Perrelli’s firm, Jenner & Block, honored him for his work which allowed the state of Florida to take the life of an innocent woman whose official cause of death was tragicomically listed as “undetermined.”
Actually, “Schiavo’s immediate cause of death was ‘marked dehydration’…”  But you can’t blame a gal for fudging the facts and exploiting a corpse when the payoff is so tragicomically good.
Also lauded by his firm were those lawyers who made “exceptional pro bono contributions on behalf of Death Row prisoners.” Yes, such is the state of the legal profession in this country that supporters of innocent life have reason to fear it, while convicted killers can depend on it for a rigorous defense.
Of course, each year a number of “convicted killers” in this country actually turn out to be a part of that “innocent life” contingent, thanks to pro bono work by attorneys, but if innocent men must die by lethal injection so that one brain dead woman may be kept alive on a feeding tube, well, that’s just the sort of tough call that freelance columnists for RenewAmerica are paid(?) to make.
We know what Shakespeare said about lawyers; it only seems more appropriate when applied to recent presidents.
Well that seems a little bloodthirsty.  I was just going to suggest we don’t buy their ghostwritten memoirs.  At least, not in hardcover.
Is it any coincidence that neither Ronald Reagan or the Bushes had law degrees and managed for the most part to elude liberal prosecution? Or that the last elected Republican president who was a lawyer was also “a crook?”
Yet Richard Nixon’s sins seem penny-ante in comparison to the goings on of our most recent lawyerly president; but not to hear the media tell it. A two-bit burglary by the Watergate bunglers was treated as a capital crime, while the reprehensible offenses — both illegal and immoral — committed by Bill Clinton were pooh-poohed as mere randy behavior by the Teflon one.
Now, to be fair, Clinton was persecuted by a coterie of serial adulterers for getting an extracurricular blowjob, but I’m pretty sure that after the Senate Watergate committee concluded its business each day, Sam Ervin did not retire to his Barcalounger and secretly bomb Cambodia.
The sad part of all of this is that we have a right to expect that a United States president — the chief executor of the law of the land as laid out in our Constitution — should have at least a working grasp of those laws and the moral strictures behind them. And this should be even more true of those who are lawyers; which brings us back to Obama and his advisors. In a presidential debate in February, he was asked about his part in the congressional intervention to save the life of Terri Schiavo; a life Perrelli fought so hard to snuff. The Big O’s answer was most illuminating:
“It wasn’t something I was comfortable with, but it was not something that I stood on the floor and stopped. And I think that was a mistake, and I think the American people understood that that was a mistake. And as a constitutional law professor, I knew better.”
If George gets to be called “the Bush,” then I suppose Obama is entitled to his own nickname, but “The Big O” strikes me as a tad informal (although, judging by the exit polls, the ladies seem to like it).  Anyway, the upshot appears to be that Perrelli was part of a legal team that advised Michael Schiavo, while Obama voted along with the rest of the Senate to allow Terri Schiavo’s parents to take her case from state to federal court, but later regretted voting for “a bill that allowed Congress to intrude where it shouldn’t have.”  Meaning that Obama’s alleged crime is…?
Either way, it appears that in the makeup of his administrations and the way in which it seeks to suppress information before it is even installed, recalls that of his fellow law professor from Arkansas. And both of these legal scholars would be better served had they sought to know better the wording of U.S. Code Title 18, Section 4, which reads:
    Misprision of a Felony: Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
Now maybe Mr. Perrelli, a former counsel to Janet Reno — whose rein of terror included the Waco Massacre and the midnight raid on Elian Gonzalez — together with Greg Craig, Clinton’s Impeachment trial mouthpiece and brave defender of John Hinckley, Jr. and Fidel Castro’s interests in the Gonzalez case, can help Obama out with the legal and ethical implications of all of this. After all, these are the legal eagles who gave us the most ethical administration in history, right?
So…Okay, wait…So…Obama voted to allow the Federal courts to override the state courts decision to remove the feeding tube, but because he later had second thoughts, he became an unindicted co-conspirator with the Florida Supreme Court which allowed Terri Schiavo to be taken off life support, even though Dr. Bill Frist had remotely diagnosed her as hale and healthy and perfectly capable of getting by with a brain that was half normal size and partially liquified, because a thing like that hadn’t stopped Rick Santorum!  Or…
Wait…
This is a trick question, isn’t it?
Posted by scott on December 19th, 2008

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