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"There's a new Congress in town…"

Well, I don't know about you guys, but so far I think the 110th Congress is an unqualified success.  I especially liked hearing Grandma Pelosi quietly and patiently explain to the Toddler-in-Chief today that he needs to suck it up and learn to effing cooperate before she pulls this country over and tans his behind out in front of God and everybody.

Think Progress has the video.  

SPEAKER PELOSI: Calm down with the threats. There is a new Congress in town. We respect your constitutional role; we want you to respect ours. This war must end. The American people have lost faith in the President’s conduct of the war. Let’s see how we can work together. This war is diminishing the strength of our military, not honoring our commitment to our veterans, and not holding the Iraqi government accountable.

That's riiiiiiiight, y'all.  The Imperial Presidency has run aground on the submerged reef of accountability, suffered massive damage to its hull, and is currently taking on water at a high rate of speed.

Frankly, I don't understand why we don't just go ahead and impeach the little turd.  And his minder, Dead-Eye.  And absolutely anyone and everyone that their vipers'-nest of an administration has appointed to any job at all since the 2000 elections.  I mean, what further proof could we possibly need at this point that every little thing Republicans touch is irretrievably corrupted and infected, rotting from the inside from unchecked necrotic politicization?  The Justice Department, the GSA, the War and subsequent "Reconstruction" in Iraq, the Patriot Act, the nation's intelligence agencies, the educational system, everything these filthy kleptocrats have turned their hands to has been sullied almost beyond repair by the "loyal Bushies'" insistence on politicizing EVERYTHING.

From "The Pleasurers of the President", a Chris Lehman piece about the US Attorney firings in today's New York Observer:

 Except, of course, this case is all about legal authority of the most destructively controlling sort. “You particularly have the legal branch of government trashing the law,” says legal historian Stanley I. Kutler, author of the Nixon-tapes chronicle Abuse of Power. “The rule of law isn’t applying to the rulers any longer.”

Mr. Kutler notes as well that this sort of core tampering with the separation of powers isn’t exactly easy to reel back once it’s been unleashed. “So am I supposed to think that Hillary will instantly bring my habeas corpus back?” Mr. Kutler asks. “For 40 years, I taught legal and constitutional history. I’m glad I’m no longer teaching. If I had to give one of those lectures today, I’d have to tell my students, ‘This is all now bullshit.’”
 
Veterans of past Justice Departments feel much the same outrage.
 
“When I joined the Justice Department in 1990,” recalls Jonathan Shapiro, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, “there were still folks around who would tell you the story about how they lined the hallways to give Elliott Richardson a standing ovation when he left,” after the then Attorney General resigned in protest over Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. “When I left the job in 1998, there was still the sense that it was verboten to fuck around the with the U.S. attorneys. No one had the brass to fire them for political motivations—it would look far too craven, partisan and dirty.”
But "craven, partisan, and dirty" is the only thing Republicans know how to do these days.  Fiscal responsibility went out the window in the "Me first, bitchez!" Reagan 80's.  "Morality" and "Family Values" left the station the moment Newt Gingrich fucked an employee on his desk in between Impeachment hearings for Bill Clinton.  "Patriotism"?  Don't make me laugh.  If there's one thing that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, Althouses, and Coulters have proven to us in the last decade, it's that their version of "patriotism" would be a lot more appropriate to Kim Jong Il's boot-licking inner circle of cronies or Saddam Hussein's extended family than it is here in The Country Formerly Known as the Land of the Free.
 
Frankly, I hope that President Pissypants cleaves as tightly as he can to his little jumped-up ambulance chaser buddy from Austin, Alberto.  I also hope he vetoes the Iraq bill.  Why?  Because this presidency is wounded, bleeding in the water.  I don't think the administration really realizes at this point how deeply isolated they are and how much the public has come to despise them.  A Constitutional Crisis might set the stage nicely for drawing up the Articles of Impeachment.
 
And even if, somehow, Chimpy manages to actually make it to the end of his term, his current round of high-handed petulance in the face of real crises to our nation's well-being are not going to serve his party well in the decades to come.  I think that in their quest for Karl Rove's "Permanent Republican Majority", the Republicans have accomplished exactly the opposite, a Republican Party that's going to have to start sucking dicks for change in a bus-station bathroom to support itself for the next 50 years.
 
But given their track-record on everything else, does this surprise you?
 
Well, tonight there's a new document dump over at TPM Muckraker, so get your cyber-rake and dig in!  This batch could be particularly good, according to Josh:

(March 28, 2007 — 06:39 PM EDT)

Hmmm. Looks like the new document dump may contain some bad emails for the White House. More soon.

– Josh Marshall  
And then tomorrow morning, we've got roly-poly little Karl Rove Wannabe Kyle Sampson testifying before Congress. 
 
This Thursday, though, viewers tuning in to Senate hearings looking into the administration's latest scandal, the U.S. attorney firings, will get a peek at a chief of staff who just might represent the perfect distillation of Bush's much-maligned administration: D. Kyle Sampson, who, until two weeks ago, held the title for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Though Sampson himself has kept a low profile since he quit amid the rising waters at the Justice Department, his old press clips and the massive volume of e-mails released to congressional investigators depict a magical combination of piousness and arrogance, bumbling and dogmatism, hackery and, now, deep trouble. He's central casting's version of a loyal Bushie.
 
(snip)
 
When it comes time for a movie version of the Bush administration, the Libby story will play as a high-stakes intellectual thriller (the protagonist writes novels set in Japan!) and the Safavian crimes will be part of a sweeping underworld saga (the intrigues of the house of Abramoff). Sampson, meanwhile, could most easily be commemorated via rather lower-brow fare. The e-mails depict the government as a Police Academy sequel or substandard frat-house comedy, with Sampson as one of the student council types sucking up to the college dean. Is Steve Guttenberg free these days?
Awwww.  Steve Guttenberg?  Now that's just mean.
 
Word on the street is that this testimony is going to be explosive, so stay tuned.  And get some rest!  Tomorrow's going to be a big day.
 

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