Awhile back on "Law & Order" they had a scenario where a couple of guys had been conniving wickedly, but the only witness who could testify against either was the other one of the pair. They had the one guy all set to sing and then they put him on the stand and he said he and the other fellow had run up to Massachusetts the day before and gotten married, therefore he was refusing to testify under spousal privilege.
That of course was fiction. The following is what passes for reality these days. At least these two crooks aren't infested with Teh Ghey. From Taegan Goddard yesterday:
Two Bush administration officials "who have been linked in scandal are now linked in wedlock. The union of former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles and Sue Ellen Wooldridge could have implications for the investigation into Griles's ties to ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff," The Hill reports.
Ain't it just [sniff, sniff, weep, blow nose, accidentally open large box filled with metal BBs onto the red wedding carpet] so sweet? Republican devotion to marriage & traditional family 'n' shit...it just gets me right [pats hand over lower digestive tract] here. But to continue:
"They were married March 26, three days after Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his relationship with Abramoff and a previous romantic partner. Wooldridge was the top environmental prosecutor at the Department of Justice (DoJ) before she resigned in January. Legal experts note that people can refuse to testify against their spouses, and that in some cases, people can prevent their spouse from testifying against them."
Said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley: "There have been plenty of cases where marriage was a good strategy for a criminal defendant. But It's plausible they simply picked an odd time to wed."
Here, you can have the box of kleenex now. I've moved on to borrowing Lambert's puke bucket.
Abramoff, by this among other accounts, is apparently the one singing like a whole colony of monk parrots these days. Yeah it will probably reduce his already inadequate sentence quite a good bit, but we must not be cynical. Repentance and character reform is after all the goal of our penal system, right?
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I don’t think the
I don't think the marriage privilege is valid for acts carried out prior to the wedding. Although if it were it would probably be the best way to convince Rethugs to support same sex marriage - Dukestir could have protected himself by marrying Jack.
Did you check the bucket to make sure it wasn't already full?
Call me crazy, but I'm starting to think that all Republicans are crooks. A couple more Congress-critters indicted today; our pets get poisoned; old people get abused in nursing homes; student loan executives enriching themselves; NCLB cronies enriching themselves; Wolfie getting his girlfriend a job with a whole lot more money... The list is starting to get rather long, and that's only stuff I remember reading this week!
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.
not all, Lambert.
There were 8 prosecuting Federal Attorneys that Gonzales fired.
Of course, they may have been the only ones.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
It should be the default assumption these days
re: Republican=crook that is. The few who werent' before the Bush crowd came to town have either succumbed to temptation to join them, quit the party or retired from public life altogether in shame, or been driven out for failure to Get With The Program.
After all, you can't have people on the inside who might get pangs of conscience and rat you out. I learn such things from watching The Sopranos, which is a valuable taxonomic and tourism guide to These People's modus operandi.
Oh, and I think at the next meeting of the Corrente Building Maintenance & Grounds Committee we should look into getting you a bigger bucket. It's that or move you to the even smaller spare room over closer to the abbatoir for ease of emptying on a more regular schedule, but moving is such a pain.
Okay, maybe two new buckets...
Oh what the hell. Buckets for everybody...Frank Rich today (beware, pdf file, but on the other hand any knothole in the Evil Paywall is a good thing) has a nice, which is to say nauseating, rundown on Recent Developments in Crime of the sort we are here discussing, albeit not this one in particular which probably broke too late for his deadline.
Interesting clip, which he accurately, alas, notes that we all missed completely thanks to the Imus kerfluffle: well, shit, now I remember you can't copy out of a PDF but the gist is thusly--Back when Bernie Kerik was up for HomelandSecSec, the person in charge of vetting him out was none other than good ol' Abu Al G! Who is now nailed, by none other than our ol pal John Solomon and partner at the Post, for knowing full well about everything from his (Kerik's) mob links to his fuckbuddy status with Judith Regan.
And yet Abu Al was entirely cool with this and would have shepherded the nomination right through the then-R senate, had it not been for a (probably totally bogus, since iirc the alleged person has never been produced in public) undocumented-nanny claim.
Much good stuff, although (imho) curiously understated by Rich's usual standards of flair with language. No matter, and no matter that little besides that Kerik angle is new to anybody here. This stuff has to be flogged over and over and over again to soak in to the general populace, and this column will help do this.
But we've got to find a quality US supplier for buckets. The demand is stepping up and damned if I'm gonna keep buying this plastic Chinese crap.
We need to be thinking "modus operandi" not "policy differences"
The question with the Repbublicans is: How much can they wreck and steal?
And even the Moderate
ones--say, Susan Collins--must know what the others do, even if they don't personally practice it.
So, they're all guilty.
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.