Good for Her

Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press reports:

Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials filed court papers Monday arguing that the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system.

It was the first time that Reno, attorney general in the Clinton administration, has spoken out against the administration’s policies on terrorism detainees, underscoring how contentious the court fight over the nation’s new military commissions law has become. Former attorneys general rarely file court papers challenging administration policy.

So far the righties have been fairly subdued, but one commenter to a rightie site couldn’t resist a walk down memory lane. He writes:

I am always amused by those on the Left crying about the Constitution.

1. Does anybody remember Ruby Ridge and a dead child and woman there?
2. Does anybody remember Waco – Branch Davidians and women and children killed there?
3. Does anybody remember Elian Gonzales being forcibly sent back to Communist Cuba?

It appears all children are at risk whenever Janet Reno is involved with any issue and she seems the forget about the Constitution herself from time to time!

How come these meatballs never remember that Ruby Ridge occurred during the George H.W. Bush Administration (August 1992)? Or that the investigation conducted by former Republican Senator Jack Danforth concluded the Branch Davidians shot their children and then each other?

I’m not sure that Elian Gonzalez’s issue was a constitutional one, as Gonzalez was a foreign national, but he wasn’t sent back “forcibly.” He was (willingly) returned to the custody of his father, who had plenty of opportunity to request asylum from Cuba, and did not. “Forcible” would have been taking him away from his father and making him stay.

Details, details.

And does anyone remember that the new RNC chair, Sen. Mel Martinez, made his bones with the GOP by attacking Janet Reno during in the Gonzalez Saga? You can read about it at Media Matters.

11 thoughts on “Good for Her

  1. This is off topic; but, it cracked me up. I thought Maha and the readers would find it amusing, also. But, it is also a good example of the right wing meatballs.

    “Kentucky Newspaper Raises Alarm Bells In Editorial “Hippies Still Trying To Ruin The Country”…
    Lexington Herald-Leader | Jenean Mcbrearty | Posted November 21, 2006 10:13 AM
    America won’t win another war until the 1960s flower children are pushing up petunias.

    Radicalized, the flower children morphed into lefty loonies who now masquerade as social progressives. No matter what they rename themselves, however, their agenda hasn’t changed.” — Here, again, is a right winger wishing the deaths of liberals. Whatever happened to “live and let live”?

    Additionally, I sometimes wish that in these cases on the wiretapping that some judge will follow the example set by Judge Sirica, the Watergate tapes judge. He ordered Nixon to turn the tapes over to him and listened to them himself to determine if they were of national security or not. This White House should be required to provide a judge with a list of all phones tapped and let him make a judgment such as Sirica did. As an example, if the list contained only telephone numbers of Democrats, then it most likely had nothing to do with national security. Just a thought.

    P.S. I suppose if the judge selected was Roberts or Scalia, I probably would not trust the subsequent ruling.

  2. Good for Reno. Let’s hope this action shortens the time left for the Bush gang to stay ‘on the loose’, dangerous to law, order, and humanity.

    Today, I was asking myself, “How many more American soldiers will die while George Bush continues to deny the reality in Iraq?”

    Bush cares more about his own image [i.e., salvaging his ‘place in the history books’] than about our soldiers. Bush is choosing to leave them to die in the middle of an Iraqi civil war for the ungodly reason of wanting time to find a way to salvage his ego from the mess he has made.

  3. We’ll win in the effort to bring Bush to account if we don’t quit.

    Does anybody know of a comparable failure in history as big as the failure that Bush has engineered? I didn’t think so. Preemptive warfare when the cause for preemption didn’t materialize after the invasion? What a major historical fuck-up!… Bush is no longer a leader… he’s a clown, a buffoon, and history will record his stupidity as such.

    ” the facts were fixed around the policy”..That statement is not going to go away.We can never have closure on Iraq until we settle the reason we went into Iraq. Failure will demand it. Bush deceived the American people and disgraced our nation.

  4. Oh, I hope so, Swami. I guess it depends on who writes those history books. It will be educational to see the lies in print – whatever they turn out to be.
    Just feeling pessimistic, this morning.

  5. Pingback: The Mahablog » Update

  6. They don’t remember because it is fairly obvious that the only way you can be in the right-wing of American politics is to lie. Lie to yourself, lie to everyone else, about nearly everything.

    The right doesn’t do nuance. They simply want reality to conform to their beliefs.

    Normally, people who feel this way are institutionalized. Things is, people who do this who are not frankly schizophrenic tend to know when to hide their desire for reality to conform to their beliefs; but the right has become so torqued up in recent years they’re forgetting to hide their more idiotic beliefs and desires.

    And so we see things like the Kentucky editorial (what they hell are they smoking down there?), and knee-jerk references to Waco. These meatballs not only forget the timing of the event, and salient facts of the case, they also forget the crucial fact that Koresh was a nutcase on the order of Jim Jones.

    Although, that said, if you compared some of the things Koresh force-fed his followers with the things certain wing-nut preachers feed *their* followers, there probably wouldn’t be much difference.

    These deranged homo-sapiens will always be with us. We just have to make sure they’re defanged.. They get out-of-control every now and then, hence the last six years. We in the reality-based community have to be more vigilant, and push back more strongly against these idiots. Or the next President they elect will be Genghis Mugabe Jr….and I don’t want Genghis’ finger on the button, thanks very much. The Current Occupant’s finger is bad enough.

  7. Good for Reno.

    The tactic of the right – shoot the messenger, and change the subject needs to be challenged. “We were talking about a brief filed by a former AG which challenges the legality of an administration policy..” Journalists and bloggers need to be direct bordering on rude with righties who won’t address the subject on the table. Too many people will get sucked into discussing Reno – and it’s not about HER!

    Abandoning Habeas Corpus will go down as one of the most disgraceful departures from our own heritage in our lifetime.

  8. Don’t forget that both Waco and Ruby Ridge were actually planned during the Bush1 administration. Reno had nothing to do with Waco until after it suddenly blew up in everyone’s faces. Er, so to speak….

  9. Don’t forget that both Waco and Ruby Ridge were actually planned during the Bush1 administration.

    I do remember that. I also remember thinking at the time that once the seige had started, there was no way Koresh would surrender or let his culties leave.

    And, of course, had David Koresh been black, the righties would have whined that the feds should have bombed the place.

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