Editorial: Doolittle's dilemma

[maddezmom]

Editorial: Doolittle's dilemma
Plot thickens, but final chapter not written

What a difference a year makes. This time last year, Sacramento-area political leaders made their annual pilgrimage to Washington, an event known as Cap to Cap. On that trip, Rep. John Doolittle was the man to meet. The Roseville Republican was in the majority party. He was on the key Appropriations Committee that doled out the dough. He was a coveted insider. And while Republican pillars such as Tom DeLay found themselves out of politics and in trouble, Doolittle seemed defiant and confident that none of it would ever affect him.

~snip~

He once said he didn't need a lawyer to deal with questions about such matters as his hiring of his wife to handle fund-raising or his dealings with surrogates close to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Now he has an attorney, and he seems to need one. Department of Justice officials recently raided his house in Virginia. A former Doolittle aide who once worked for Abramoff resigned suddenly from a Washington law firm at about the time the raid occurred. Doolittle has stepped down from his key post on the Appropriations Committee.

It is too soon to say where all this is leading. Doolittle vigorously denies he has done anything wrong. That stridently defiant streak in his political personality will end up serving him in one of two ways. Perhaps the inner confidence will help him move beyond a probe if it ends without further damage to his career. Or perhaps it will be his undoing, if his long-standing claims are contradicted by evidence of wrongdoing.

more:http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/161154.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Typical Sacto Bee editorial. What a crap rag!

I think the thing to consider is that it's Albert Gonzales's (the Bush Cartel's) Justice Department doing the investigating. How do we know this in on the up and up, and doesn't have some snake-the-grass Bush/Gonzales purpose? THAT is the problem. We can have no confidence in ANYTHING--not in anything that the Bush Junta does, nor in anything we read in the war profiteering corporate monopoly newspapers, or see/hear on the vile radio/TV corporate monopoly "news" and "opinion" shows.

For all we know, they are blackmailing him. He's probably real dirty. What Republican isn't? But how do we know what is really going on? They could have picked corruptible candidates, in order to control them. They could be planting evidence. They could be trying to silence someone who has dirt on them. They could be doing this--and could have set up a number of corruptible Republicans--as cover for Gonzales, who now has TWO obstructions of justices under his belt, that we know about--to make it appear that his Justice Dept. is impartial. This is an AG who, when he was White House counsel, gave the Plame/Brewster-Jennings outers a 12 hour heads up to shred documents and burn hard drives, and who also fired US Attorneys and hired toadies in order to interfere with prosecutions for political reasons. The AG is a CRIMINAL. He is also a lying scumbag and the author of the "torture memo" (twisted legal arguments to create immunity for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, on torturing prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice).

It's POSSIBLE that the heat put on Gonzales by Congressional investigations is freeing "good guys" in the Dept. of Justice and the FBI to pursue straight-up prosecution of corrupt Republicans. But the thing is we don't know, and we can't know, when their boss is himself a perp--and when HIS bosses are also perps, and war criminals.

I just mention this as a caution. Be skeptical. Question. Look deep. Don't take anything in the corporate media at face value.