Alberto Gonzales: Tip of the Iceberg

As Democratic and Republican leaders alike pile on to demand Alberto Gonzales' resignation, only George W. Bush is singing his praises. Deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Bush was happy with Gonzales' testimony. "The attorney general continues to have the president's full confidence," she said.

It's not surprising that Bush would be pleased. Like a good soldier, Gonzales, who claimed a faulty memory 70 times, was careful not to incriminate his bosses.

Bush and Cheney hired Gonzales as attorney general to carry out their plan to amass governmental power in the hands of the Executive. They knew they could count on him.

Gonzales' bona fides were well-known to his bosses. When he was counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush from 1995 to 1997, Gonzales provided his boss with "scant summaries" on capital punishment cases that "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," according to the Atlantic Monthly.

Gonzales prepared 57 such summaries, including one regarding the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man executed for murdering a restaurant manager. The jury was never told about his mental condition. Gonzales's three-page summary of the case for Bush mentioned only that Washington's defense counsel's 30-page plea for clemency (which covered the mental competency issue) was rejected by the Texas parole board. Bush refused to stay executions in 56 of the 57 cases in which Gonzales wrote abbreviated memos.

The attorney general was central to the Bush-Cheney-Yoo illegal domestic surveillance program. When he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee after the New York Times uncovered the secret spying program, attorney general Gonzales walked in lockstep with his bosses. Gonzales would not tell the senators whether Bush had authorized other secret programs. He refused to say whether the government could wiretap purely domestic calls without a warrant, or whether he had the authority to search the first class mail of American citizens or to examine people's medical records. When Republican Senator John Cornyn asked him whether law enforcement could shoot down a plane with drugs, Gonzales said, "I'd have to think about that."

At Gonzales' confirmation hearing for attorney general, he said he wasn't sure whether torturing prisoners could be lawful. The former Texas Supreme Court justice surely knew the terms of the Convention Against Torture, a treaty ratified by the United States and therefore part of the supreme law of the land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The convention says, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."

Yet, as White House counsel, Gonzales had advised Bush that the Geneva Conventions, which mandate humane treatment for all captives, were "quant" and "obsolete." Gonzales' advice facilitated the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo and secret CIA prisons around the world. Gonzales had evidently done his homework. The Nazi lawyers at Nuremberg also advised their clients that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete."

Gonzales' confirmation testimony led the New York Times to opine, "Mr. Bush had made the wrong choice when he rewarded Mr. Gonzales for his loyalty," and the Washington Post to say, "The message Mr. Gonzales left with senators was unmistakable: As attorney general, he will seek no change in practices that have led to the torture and killing of scores of detainees and to the blackening of U.S. moral authority around the world." The Post concluded, "Those senators who are able to reach clear conclusions about torture and whether the United States should engage in it have reason for grave reservations about Mr. Gonzales."

In 2005, Bush said, "Al Gonzales is a great friend of mine. I'm the kind of person, when a friend gets attacked, I don't like it." Eventually, however, Bush will have to unload Gonzales the way he unloaded his friend Donald Rumsfeld. Loyal Republican senators trying to paint Gonzales as incompetent don't want the finger to point higher to the real culprits - Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

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The New Watergate: U.S. Attorneys and Voting Rights

The Bush administration is shocked, shocked, that the firing of a few U.S. attorneys has caused such a stir in Washington. After all, the Oval Office says, the President can choose whomever he wants to prosecute federal cases. But the Supreme Court declared in Berger v. United States that a prosecutor's job is to see that justice is done, not to politicize justice. The mass ouster of the top prosecutors had more to do with keeping a grip on power - by manipulating voting rights - than with doing justice. And like the Watergate scandal, the evidence points to a cover-up.

This cover-up revolves around efforts by the Bush administration to disenfranchise African-American voters in communities where the vote would likely be close. George W. Bush came to power in 2000 by a razor-thin margin awarded him by the Supreme Court. During the 2004 election, there were allegations of attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters, especially in Ohio. Yet no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African-American or Native American voters from 2001 to 2006.

Instead, the administration instigated efforts that would further disenfranchise these voters. U.S. attorneys were instructed to prosecute "voter fraud" cases. "Voter fraud" has "become almost synonymous with 'voting while black,'" the New York Times' Paul Krugman observed. Also, Republican lawmakers enacted voter ID laws which established new hurdles for voters to jump.

Former staffers in the Justice Department's civil rights division said they were "repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia's voter ID law to Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters," Krugman added.

The administration's effort to prosecute voter fraud is a sham. The New York Times reports that voter experts have found "widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud." However, the Election Assistance Commission, a federal panel charged with election research, skewed the findings of the voter experts.

The Bush administration has been hyping voter fraud since the last election; Karl Rove called it an "enormous and growing" problem. Two of the fired U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias from Albuquerque and John McKay from Seattle, were dismissed because they refused to file voter fraud charges after being warned to do so by well-placed Republicans. Others were fired for pursuing investigations of Republicans.

Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' former right-hand man, wrote in an email that the qualification to be a U.S. attorney was to be a "loyal Bushie."

Shortly after the Watergate break-in, President Richard Nixon and his loyal chief of staff H.R. Haldeman spoke in the old Executive Office Building. Their conversation was taped, but 18.5 minutes were erased. This gap incriminated Nixon in the cover-up which eventually led to his impeachment and resignation.

Likewise, there is a suspicious 16-day gap in the email records between the Justice Department and the White House just before seven of the U.S. attorneys were fired in December. Moreover, many of the communications about the matter were conducted using email accounts of the Republican National Committee instead of government accounts, possibly in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The Los Angeles Times reported that senior Justice Department officials prepared documentation to justify the firings after the dismissals. One Justice Department official threatened to "retaliate" against the eight fired U.S. attorneys if they continued to publicly speak about their dismissals.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who heads the Justice Department, denied he was involved in discussions about the firings. But Sampson testified that Gonzales was consulted at least five times and signed off on the plan to fire the U.S. attorneys. "I don't think it's entirely accurate what he [Gonzales] said," Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Gonzales is reportedly sweating bricks over his own testimony before that Committee, slated for April 17. As a result of Gonzales' stonewalling in response to the House Judiciary Committee's request for documents, committee chairman Rep. John Conyers has subpoenaed the records. If the Justice Department defies the subpoena, the Judiciary Committee, and the full Congress, could cite the department for contempt of Congress, and a federal grand jury could issue criminal indictments for obstruction of justice.

The White House has indicated it will not allow Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify under oath. Why the resistance unless they intend to lie?

Alberto Gonzales should be fired, not just for malfeasance in the U.S. attorney affair, but also for advising Bush to violate the Geneva Conventions which led to torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Recall that Gonzales told Bush the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete." Those were the same words the Nazi lawyers used at Nuremberg to describe the Geneva Conventions.

Firing Gonzales may temporarily stanch the flood of accusations about the U.S. attorney matter. But the corruption, the lawbreaking, and the cover-up go deeper - all the way up to the Oval Office. Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers will put impeachment back on the table.

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Cut and Run vs. Cut and Parade

In another Woody Allen moment reminiscent of George W. Bush pinning the Medal of Freedom on disgraced ex-CIA Director George Tenet, a third George - General Casey - has taken a page from the Democrats' troop withdrawal playbook.

After being prepped with the Pentagon's 74-page cheat sheet about "staying the course" rather than "cutting-and-running" from Iraq, the Republicans walked in lockstep for the past two weeks, shooting down the Democrats' calls for bringing our soldiers home.

Late last week, Casey, the US commander in Iraq, condemned the concept of a withdrawal timetable. "I don't like it," he declared. "I feel it would limit my flexibility. I think it would give the enemy a fixed timetable, and I think it would send a terrible signal to a new government of national unity in Iraq that's trying to stand up and get its legs underneath it."

At the same time, speaking out of both sides of his medals, Casey was secretly recommending that Bush drastically reduce our troop commitment, coincidentally, just before the November elections. How bizarre.

Maybe it wasn't Woody Allen who said, "When you're being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade." But that's just what the un-indicted Karl Rove is best at.

Rove knows that the mess his boss created in Iraq will be on voters' minds come November. By pulling the rug out from under the (semi-unified) Democrats' strongest issue, he maximizes the chances of GOP retention of Congress.

Senator John Kerry, who finally admitted a couple of weeks ago he was wrong to vote for the war, said Casey's plan "looks an awful lot like what the Republicans spent the last week attacking. Will the partisan attack dogs now turn their venom and disinformation campaign on General Casey?" Unlikely, given the GOP's proclivity to goosestep to its commander in chief.

Keeping his options open, Bush conditions the pullback on the Iraqis' ability to do the job. He can always send the troops back in after the election.

Things are not going swimmingly in Iraq right now. Twelve US troops died or were found dead this week. On Friday, a car bomb killed at least 5 people and wounded 18 in Basra. A bomb hit the Sunni mosque in Hibhib northeast of Baghdad where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed earlier this month; Friday's bomb killed 10 worshippers and wounded 15. Also on Friday, the Iraqi government declared a state of emergency in Baghdad as US and Iraqi forces battled resistance fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles near the Green Zone.

On Monday, bombs at markets in two Iraqi cities killed at least 40 people and at least 22 others died throughout Iraq.

The same day, Zalmay Khalizad, US ambassador to Iraq, verified claims in a paper he signed documenting retaliation against Iraqis working with the US in the Green Zone. He touted the 8 hours of electricity per day that people in Baghdad now enjoy, up from 4 just a month ago.

Ultimately, the Bush administration plans to retain a small contingent of about 50,000 troops and the large "super" military bases it is building in Iraq, the raison d'etre for Operation "Iraqi Freedom." Bush has no intention of ever leaving Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented a 24-point national reconciliation plan on Sunday.

Maliki's original plan called for the recognition of the legitimacy of the national resistance, differentiating it from the terrorists. It also advocated a timetable for withdrawal of coalition forces, and amnesty for Iraqis who had not killed civilians. Under intense pressure from the Bush administration and the Shia-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, these provisions were removed from the final document.

According to recent surveys, 87 percent of Iraqis favor a withdrawal timetable for US forces. On Monday, one Sunni leader in Iraq said the insurgency would persist until Washington sets such a timetable, but 7 Sunni groups offered the government a conditional truce.

The prime minister's plan aims to offer amnesty to insurgents "not proved to be involved in crimes, terrorist activities and war crimes against humanity." That would seem to exclude Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice.

Oddly, it was the Democrats who screamed the loudest about the amnesty plan. Senator Carl Levin called it "unconscionable," exclaiming, "For heaven's sake, we liberated that country." Tell that to the Iraqi people.

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Harriet Miers: Bush's Pit Bull

Bush has nominated his Texas crony as a stealth appointment to the Supreme Court. Although the Senate will be hard-pressed to discover Harriet Miers's positions on the critical issues, she does have a long record of loyalty to Bush, whom she calls "the most brilliant man I ever met." Bush undoubtedly knows where she stands - and it doesn't appear to be on the side of civil liberties.

Miers represented a string of large corporations, including Walt Disney Co., Microsoft, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Citibank and the Bank of America. Like John Roberts, Harriet Miers has no history of protecting the rights of women, minorities, the poor, the disabled or the environment.

Some far-right Christian organizations appear disappointed that Bush didn't tap an ideological judge like Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, J. Michael Luttig, or Michael W. McConnell. Public Advocate President Eugene Delgaudio calls Miers's nomination "a betrayal of the conservative, pro-family voters whose support put Bush in the White House in both the 2000 and 2004 elections and who were promised Supreme Court appointments in the mold of Thomas and Scalia."

Miers has never been a judge, so there is no concrete evidence of her judicial philosophy. But when Rush Limbaugh sought reassurance from Dick Cheney that Miers's judicial philosophy parallels that of Scalia or Thomas, Cheney responded, "I'm confident that she has a conservative judicial philosophy that you'd be comfortable with ... And the President has great confidence in her judicial philosophy."

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and one of the most radical evangelical conservatives, sanctioned the Miers nomination after a well-placed call from Karl Rove. "Some of what I know I am not at liberty to talk about," Dobson said.

Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court testified to Miers's bona fides as an evangelical Christian. He guarantees that Miers personally opposed abortion and attended "pro-life" events with him.

Bush is asking his right-wing religious backers to take it on faith that Miers will fulfill their agenda of further Christianizing America. There are clues that would confirm that faith. When Bush named Miers as White House Counsel to replace newly minted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Bush used the fundamentalist buzz word "grace" to describe Miers. She works with Exodus Ministries, which is dedicated to fulfilling released prisoners' "need for intimate knowledge of the saving grace of Jesus Christ." Its website proclaims that "Exodus is a place where ex-offenders learn how faith in Christ is the first step from captivity to freedom."

After the American Bar Association voted to take a pro-choice position, Miers led the charge to have that vote reconsidered by the ABA membership. While we can expect her to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was only concerned with the proper role for the ABA, Miers's enthusiasm for undoing the ABA's pro-choice stance belies such an excuse.

Harriet Miers was the first woman to serve as president of the Texas Bar Association. Yet she opposed a plan that would guarantee the election of a racial or ethnic minority bar president every sixth year.

Senate Majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee is delighted with the Miers nomination. He called her "another outstanding nominee," describing her selection as "a nomination we are excited about, we are pleased with." Frist says "she is a woman who understands judicial restraint."

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada is equally ebullient. Evidently relieved that Bush didn't nominate the dreaded Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown, Reid declared, "I'm very happy we have someone like her."

Harriet Miers is likely to be as circumspect about her views as was John Roberts about his. Indeed, it was Miers who refused to share Roberts' memos from his tenure in the Solicitor General's office with the Senate. Miers will not share her records from her service in the Bush administration either.

Like Roberts, Miers has been a Republican party loyalist. She is being rewarded for her 12-year service to Bush, who plucked her from his inner circle of confidantes. In 1996, Bush called the loyal Miers, who helped Bush hide his National Guard record, "a pit bull in size 6 shoes." Hardly a fitting replacement for the open-minded Sandra Day O'Connor.

When Bush nominated Miers, he proclaimed, "She has devoted her life to the rule of law and the causes of justice." On the contrary, it appears that Miers has devoted her life to the interests of big corporations and George W. Bush.

The senators and the American people will be left to guess at how Miers feels about the issues that affect our lives.

Harriet Miers is not an intellectual giant like John Roberts. The enigmatic Miers must persuade the senators that she is committed to equality under the law. Harriet Miers has a high burden to carry to convince the Senate that she is qualified to sit on the highest court in the land.

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The Roberts Court?

Consider this: John Roberts's nomination for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court is confirmed by the Senate. Chief Justice William Rehnquist steps down. Then, Bush elevates Roberts to Chief.

This scenario would avoid the nasty fight that would surely ensue if Bush elevated his model Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia - or chose another rabid right-winger - to be Chief Justice. The Democrats lined up to pose with the smiling Roberts during his expertly choreographed visit to the Senate last week - not a word about a filibuster if Roberts refuses to explain his record as apologist for the Reagan and Bush I administrations and the big corporations he represented. And judging from the giddy reaction of Operation Rescue and the Family Research Council to Roberts's nomination for Associate Justice, Bush's conservative base would be thrilled.

Rehnquist was a radical, far out of the mainstream of the rest of the Court, when Ronald Reagan made him Chief. When he clerked for Justice Robert Jackson, Rehnquist had written a memo called, "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases," in which he advised Justice Jackson to affirm Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" doctrine in future segregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. The memo stated, "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my 'liberal' colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." Rehnquist concluded that the Court should uphold segregation and refuse to protect "special claims" simply "because its members individually are 'liberals' and dislike segregation." Plessy was later overturned in Brown v. Board of Education.

A former Rehnquist law clerk, Roberts is Rehnquist Lite - but less controversial than Rehnquist was when he became Chief. While not directly attacking Brown, Roberts, as Associate Counsel to President Reagan, argued in favor of right-wing legislation that would have prohibited judges from ordering busing to desegregate schools. Why? Because, said Roberts, busing "promotes segregation rather than remedying it, by precipitating white flight."

Hale fellow, well met, Roberts is smooth. Since junior high, he has assiduously groomed himself to be on the Supreme Court. In a footnote in his 1994 law review article, Roberts wrote, "In the interest of full disclosure, the author would like to point out that as Deputy Solicitor General for a portion of the 1992-93 term, he was involved in many of the cases discussed below. In the interest of even fuller disclosure, he would also like to point out that his views as a commentator on those cases do not necessarily reflect his views as an advocate for his former client, the United States." Roberts, who knew that someday he might have to explain those views to a Senate Judiciary Committee, set out to distance himself from them.

After Roberts's nomination last week, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the Associated Press identified Roberts as a member of the right-wing Federalist Society. But after the White House called the news organizations and informed them that Roberts said he "has no recollection" of ever being a member of the Federalist Society, they printed retractions. Lo and behold, the Washington Post reported today that John G. Roberts Jr. is listed as a member of the steering committee of the Federalist Society in its Lawyers' Division Leadership Directory, 1997-1998.

This could blow up in Bush's face. With Watergate, it was the cover-up that became the blockbuster. The same thing could happen with "Federalistgate" (and "Plamegate," for that matter).

But what if Roberts is confirmed? What would a Roberts Court look like? Roberts, who wrote a brief saying there is no right to an abortion in the Constitution, would work to overturn Roe v. Wade. But even more alarming, Roberts, who spent the lion's share of his government service in the executive branch, would extend the scope of presidential authority in an unprecedented manner.

George W. Bush has pushed the envelope of executive power to a new level - by invading a sovereign country that posed no threat to America, based on his illegal "pre-emptive war" doctrine; by declaring that, as Commander-in-Chief, he has the power to suspend the Geneva Conventions; by planning to covertly influence the "democratic" Iraqi elections; by threatening to veto any bill Congress passes that would encroach on his presidential power; by snooping through the sites we visit on the Internet and the books we read; and by shielding Karl Rove from criminal prosecution (don't be surprised if something untoward happens to the independent prosecutor investigating Rove).

Four days before Bush tapped him for the Supreme Court, Roberts, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, granted the President unchecked authority to create kangaroo courts to try suspected terrorists, even though the Constitution gives only Congress the right to establish courts.

In the never-ending war on terrorism, Roberts would likely defer to the President to torture, assassinate, or imprison for life anyone the executive dubbed a "terrorist." He would likely defer to the President by upholding the noxious provisions of the Patriot Act that threaten our civil liberties but make us no safer. And Roberts, always the company man, would likely defer to the President whenever the executive takes a position that favors corporations at the expense of workers and the environment.

The justice Roberts would replace, Sandra Day O'Connor, wrote in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld last year, "A state of war is not a blank check for the President." Judging from his decision in Hamdan, Roberts might well write the executive that blank check.

Our constitutional system is grounded in the symmetry of three co-equal branches of government, each with separate and distinct powers. The 50-year-old Roberts would have the opportunity to shape the Court for decades. By moving the judicial branch to bypass Congress and defer to the executive, Chief Justice John Roberts could preside over a Court that will destroy the separation of powers as we know it.

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Mr. Roberts' Neighborhood

Who leaked the name of John G. Roberts before Bush's official prime time revelation Tuesday night? My guess: Karl Rove. He had the most to gain from an early announcement. Rove knows the mainstream media has a very short attention span. What better way to deflect our attention away from Rove's crime in leaking the identity of a CIA operative than to leak a potentially contentious nomination for the High Court?

What we'll never know is whether, absent Rove's scandal, Bush would've nominated someone else. Other candidates would probably have drawn a virulent response from Democrats, who have taken a cautious but muted stance toward Roberts's nomination. Many talk of his scant paper trail; they call him a "stealth candidate." But Roberts's record is clear.

As a lawyer for the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and later for his corporate clients, Roberts displayed a consistent commitment to conservative doctrine. In both abortion cases he handled, he maintained a legal attack on reproductive rights. In one case, Roberts argued that Operation Rescue's routine - sometimes violent - blocking of clinics where abortions were performed constituted protected free speech.

In Rust v. Sullivan, Roberts co-authored a brief in support of regulations prohibiting family planning programs that received federal aid from providing any abortion counseling. In that brief, he wrote: "We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled ... The Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion ... finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."

During his Senate confirmation hearing for appointment to the Court of Appeals in 2003, Roberts changed his tune - apparently. When asked about his views on abortion, Roberts assured the senators, "Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land. There's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent." But his personal views wouldn't keep Roberts from unsettling Roe as the law of the land, consistent with his statement in Sullivan that there is no right to an abortion in the Constitution. Roberts would likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if presented with the opportunity as a Supreme Court justice.

Roberts has had other opportunities to demonstrate his partisanship. As a judge, he ruled against requiring Dick Cheney's energy task force to release its records to the public. He opposed protections in the Endangered Species Act. Displaying a clear conflict of interest, Roberts ruled against environmentalists seeking increased government regulation over copper smelters that emit toxic lead and arsenic pollutants; many of those smelters were owned by members of the National Mining Association. Just four years before, Roberts had filed a brief against citizens opposed to the coal industry's destructive mountaintop removal, on behalf of the same National Mining Association.

Last Friday, Roberts voted to support Bush's military commissions to try suspected terrorists, finding that the protections of the Geneva Conventions do not apply to anyone the administration believes is a member of al Qaeda. Bush established those commissions to deny the accused due process protections that are well-established in US and international law. Although he would probably recuse himself from this case if it reached the Supreme Court, Roberts is likely to walk in lockstep with the Bush administration in its "war on terror" and concomitant war on civil liberties in the years to come.

Roberts also showed his true colors when he argued for the expansion of religion in public schools, against a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who was fired by Toyota, against federal affirmative action programs, and against a congressional effort to enable minorities to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

But Roberts is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He was a member of "Lawyers for Bush-Cheney" and served as a legal advisor to Jeb Bush during the recount in the 2000 presidential campaign. He has donated to the political campaigns of several Republican candidates, including one senator on the Judiciary Committee that will vote on Roberts's nomination. He has spent most of his career as a corporate lawyer, and he comes to the Court with a partisan agenda.

At the end of the Supreme Court's 2000 term, Roberts told a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, "The conventional wisdom is that this is a conservative court. We have to take that more skeptically. On the three issues the public was most interested in - school prayer, abortion and Miranda rights - the conservatives lost on all." Sounds like wistful thinking.

It is incumbent upon the senators on the Judiciary Committee, and in the full Senate, to demand all pertinent records on Roberts from the Republican administrations in which he served. Senators must thoroughly interrogate Roberts about his views that could affect his lawmaking as a member of our highest court. They should ask him, for example, whether the Constitution has a right to privacy, and whether a woman's reproductive freedom is entitled to constitutional protection.

Roberts is not brash and outspoken. But he may well be the iron fist in the velvet glove. Having spent his entire professional career as a hired gun for the right-wing, Roberts is unlikely to betray his social and political constituency.

Those who think Roberts is a moderate who will generate little controversy need only notice the reactions of Bush's conservative religious backers. "The president is a man of his word," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian organization. "He promised to nominate someone along the lines of a Scalia or a Thomas, and that is exactly what he has done." Operation Rescue President Troy Newman agrees. "We pray that Roberts will be swiftly confirmed," he announced.

It's payback time, and Bush has delivered.

And by the way, Bush is a president who insists he is firmly committed to diversity. There have been 109 justices on the Supreme Court. Roberts will be the 105th white male. He will replace the first woman ever to sit on the High Court. That leaves only one.

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Bush at the U.N.: Sugarcoating Failure

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday 21st September, Bush spoke of spreading ''freedom'' and ''human dignity'' in Iraq and Afghanistan. He decried dictators who "believe that suicide and torture and murder are fully justified to serve any goal they declare." He accused the terrorists of seeking to destroy the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But he failed to say that the UDHR declares: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." And he forgot to mention the torture and murder of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Bush claimed "the people of Iraq have regained sovereignty." But he omitted any reference to the 150,000 U.S. troops on the ground there, who enjoy immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for any crimes they might commit.

Bush maintained that the interim Iraqi government "has earned the support of every nation that believes in self-determination and desires peace." But he didn't say that the countries in the "coalition-of-the-willing" are becoming increasingly unwilling to support his failed Iraq policy, and no new countries are jumping on the occupation bandwagon.

Bush painted a rosy picture of an Iraq moving inexorably toward democratic elections in January. He didn't acknowledge, however, the admonition of former President Jimmy Carter that free elections cannot occur when people are unable to safely walk down the street, or U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's warning that there can be no "credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now."

Bush didn't state that well over 1,000 Americans and as many as 30,000 Iraqis have died and continue to die in a war that his administration single-handedly fashioned from whole cloth.

Bush's speech did not refer to the utter absence of any weapons-of-mass-destruction, his rasion d'être for invading a sovereign country.

Bush overlooked the highly classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the government's senior analysts that paints a pessimistic assessment of the prospects for a secure and stable Iraq. He said the CIA was "just guessing" when it predicted Iraq was in danger of civil war.

And Bush didn't tell the General Assembly that Afghanistan is in chaos, with continuing violence, and the resurgence of the Taliban. He ignored the claims of several Afghan presidential candidates who seek to challenge U.S.-installed President Hamid Karzai in the upcoming "democratic" election there. They say that U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, affectionately known as "the Viceroy" for the power he wields over the Afghan government, is pressuring them not to run against Karzai. Both Karzai and Khalilzad are former consultants to Unocal, the company with deep oil interests in the region.

The New York Times characterized Bush's remarks to the General Assembly as "an inexplicably defiant campaign speech" that "glossed over the current dire situation in Iraq for an audience acutely aware of the true state of affairs, and scolded them for refusing to endorse the American invasion in the first place."

The delegates from 191 nations at the U.N. were nonplussed by Bush's assessment of the tragedy he's created.

In his comments preceding Bush's speech, Kofi Annan observed pointedly: "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it." For example, Annan cited "Iraqi prisoners disgracefully abused."

Annan finally took the gloves off last week when he declared the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegal because it violated the U.N. Charter. Last September, Annan had criticized Bush's new policy of preemptive self-defense, saying it would lead to a breakdown in international order.

Likewise, former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali last week blamed the Bush administration for the rising wave of terrorism, saying its unilateral approach has fuelled civil wars around the world. Boutros-Ghali advocated Bush remove his forces from Iraq and permit Arab countries to mediate a peaceful settlement in Iraq.

Bush's appearance before the General Assembly Tuesday was followed by the kick-off of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's maiden voyage to the U.S. with a soirée at the Waldorf-Astoria. Allawi, Bush's selection to lead the new "sovereign" Iraq, had close ties to the CIA. The day after a car bomb near a police station in central Baghdad killed 47 people, and gunmen killed 12 in an attack on a police minibus, Allawi provided assurances that elections would proceed in January as planned: "If, for any reason, [only] 300,000 people cannot vote because terrorists decide so," Allawi said lightly, "then frankly 300,000 people is not going to alter 25 million people voting," he told The Times of London and the Guardian.

In a page from Bush's playbook, Allawi said: "The war now in Iraq is really not only an Iraqi war, it's a war for the civilized world." He cautioned that the terrorists "will hit hard at the civilized world and in Washington and New York and London and Paris." One wonders which countries Allawi would include as part of his "civilized world."

As November 2 looms large, and Americans become increasingly wary of the quagmire that is Iraq, the Bush administration admits unabashedly that Allawi's "visit is about getting the United States away from the front line and placing Allawi as the face of the Iraqi people and the head of the effort," according to State Department spokesman Greg Sullivan.

The "transfer of sovereignty" from the U.S. to Iraq at the end of June, and the insistence that free elections can take place in January even in the face of a chaotic and bloody mess in Iraq, were carefully stage-managed by Karl Rove to favor Bush's election. By all accounts, after the U.S. election, Bush will order the carpet bombing of Fallujah, where resistance to the occupation is particularly strong. We can expect to see human carnage unparalleled in the war thus far if Bush wins another term.

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