What with Fitzmas and the Iraqi constitution and moving myself into new digs, I’d somehow missed this little news item:

October 17, 2005—The ongoing cover-up of a U.S. government informant's participation in mass murder in a Mexican border town extends to the highest level of the U.S. Justice Department, recently obtained public documents show.

Court testimony from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy confirms that the attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, was briefed on the U.S. prosecutor's and federal agents' complicity in the murders. However, to date, no one has been prosecuted for these "House of Death" homicides.

The informant helped carry out the slayings of a dozen people—all tortured, murdered and buried in the backyard of a house in Juárez, a sister city to El Paso, Texas. The murders occurred between August 2003 and mid-January 2004 while the informant was under the watch of federal agents and a U.S. prosecutor. The U.S. law enforcers allegedly allowed the homicides to occur in order to make a drug case against a narco-trafficker.

I’m going to assume that in the sordid world of drugs and drug law enforcement, a lot of ugly shit goes down every day, and that a story like this isn’t isolated or exceptional. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies, and perhaps I know a few too many “entrepreneurs,” but I wasn’t surprised to read about this at all.

Nor was I terribly surprised to read the rest of the article, which basically lays out yet another narrative of the Bush Cabal’s willingness to stonewall, cover up and otherwise act in every way contrary to the idea of an open and good government. The article goes on to detail:

Sutton, who oversaw the prosecutor leading the narco investigation that led to the House of Death homicides, responded to Gonzalez' letter not by investigating the charges, but rather by using his connections within the Justice Department to strike back at Gonzalez.

To make matters worse, after Ashcroft retired, his successor, Alberto Gonzales, allowed the cover-up to continue, and actually promoted Sutton to the post of vice chairman of his Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys, which plays a key role in determining DOJ policies and programs.

Hey! That sure sounds familiar- retaliating against the whistleblower and promoting the people who fucked up. It’s Classic Bushian governance.

With respect to the previous post about Evil, I want to add that it’s actually very, very easy to “prove” that the Bushies are nothing less than Full Blown Beelzeebub Evil. I’m not going to do that here, because if your eyes are open you can do it for yourself, daily. But I am going to don the CT hat, and in a very foily way suggest that there’s a reason why the Bushies are as evil as they are: because they come from a world where only evil thrives.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story that the reason why Bush’s TANG records have been suppressed relates to a bad pilot day he once had, crashing an expensive jet while stoned. You may also have heard the rumors that when he was sober enough to fly, he transported “plants” from various Central American locales to the US. I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that poppy production is up every year since we liberated Afghanistan, along with purity. It’s funny too to think about how we almost never hear about Columbia anymore, now that everything down there is hunky-dory with our good buddy Uribe. Between Poppy, Noelle and Chimpy McCokespoon, it’s hard not to see a picture of a family that likes to party. I’ve read the twins are no strangers to the Lady Mary J, as well.

If you know anything about drugs and the drug world, you know that there are two kinds of people: players and patsies. Players deal, distribute, kill, lie, cheat and steal to advance themselves in the Drug Universe. Importantly, Players include not only ‘bad guys’ selling smack to kindergarteners, but also ‘good guys’ who get (some of) their annual income from the state. Small town cops smoke just as much dope as urban liberal elites, and the line between agent, informant and “drug lord” is getting blurrier by the minute. Only patsies believe that drugs haven’t become part and parcel with all levels of our society. Only patsies think that drugs are not one of the most important aspects to our economy, including the “legitimate” side. Only patsies believe that drug use and distribution is for “the dark peoples, let them lose their souls.”

I don’t claim to know most of the details about the Bush family rise to power, but given the fact that they have demonstrated connections to Nazis and other unsavory folks, it’s not hard for me to think that drugs have played some significant role in their fortunes. I’d go as far to say that there are probably Bush coffers that are filled with drug money, along with weapons, crony contracts and insider dealings at taxpayer expense. There is just too much proof that the Bush clan and all their followers have completely dropped the pretense of honest brokers and public servants. There aren’t enough strong words in my vocabulary to describe how evil I think they are.

All this matters to me for purposes of clarity. When I talk to ‘regular’ people who don’t read news online or who are unfamiliar with life’s uglier realities, I know I seem radical and sometimes a bit foaming at the mouth. I’m a “Bush Hater” from the first days, for plenty of personal reasons. But one of the things I try to impart to people is the idea that we’re not living in a ‘normal’ age in terms of our government. There is no shortage of examples of crooked, scheming, crony loving politicians in American history. But what’s different today relates to the degree to which “actual criminals” have become integrated into our government. Why be surprised to read stories like the ones in this post, when what you’re really talking about is a mafia, an “evil empire” of people who are and have been for some time Players, taking advantage of us patsies who believe in the Rule of Law and open democratic governance?

I’m not the first person to call the Bush Cabal a Mafia, nor will I be the last. But sometimes, I wish there were an easy way to show people that in effect, we’ve got Fredo in charge and the whole cast of the Godfather, minus a big-hearted Michael, running the government of the most powerful nation on earth. History is replete with examples of what happens to nations that are taken over by corrupt, oligarchic cliques, my favorite comparison with today is the Late Imperial period in Rome. People who vie for power without the restraint of rule and law will always bring down the entire nation in the end. Remember that there is not only no Roman Empire today, but also that the “Old Mafia” has been replaced by several others, and their former territories in the urban core often resemble blighted war zones where once families and businesses thrived.

No civilization can survive when it’s being rotted from the inside out, and that’s exactly what’s happening to us. Too bad too many of us are funding these cabalists with our addictions to TV, Prozac, meth and crank. There was a reason why Mao shot all the drug addicts when the communists came to power. I wonder what form the next ruling class will take once this one finally hits rock bottom.