Party Above Country

On lunch break I just watched Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) question Attorney General Gonzales about the domestic spying scandal and I'm really just blown away by the extent to which an elected representative of the people will intentionally put in the Congressional record statements which he knows to be intentionally misleading, incomplete, half-truths.

For example, he talked about the Hamdi case, wherein the Supreme Court upheld the government's right to detain an American citizen without charges or a trial. See? What's a little eavesdropping when the military can just come into your home in a time of war and whisk you away without charges? Here's the catch: Hamdi was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. It has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand, there are no similarities. Sessions knows this, but puts the analogy in the Congressional record anyway.

In another example, he cited the Clinton Justice Department authorizing physical searches without a warrant as being part of the President's Constitutional authority. Only he doesn't mention that, at the time, that may have been true. And that subsequently the FISA law was amended to include physical searches. Apples to oranges, yet again. He was so off base on this one that the Attorney General himself had to point out the sequence of events to him.

How do people take these guys seriously? I mean they were so obviously intent on filling the record with misleading statements and half-truths that the GOP members of the Judiciary Committee refused to swear Gonzales in, even after he volunteered to do so.

Oh well. The people who voted for these assholes deserve what they get.