I
n just a couple weeks, I’ll be picking the most ridiculous story of the year from among the entries I’ve come across in my readings over the previous 12 months. Sneaking in at the last minute is Paul Abrams of HuffPo with a rank little piece called Why Rove Attacks Eric Holder: To Provide Cover for Bush’s Pardons.
Cici Connolly, WaPo national politics writer, started this ball rolling with her response to Chris Matthews’ “tell me something I don’t know” question on yesterday’s largely unwatched Chris Matthews Show when she said,
“Word on the street is that Karl Rove is going to be helping lead the fight against Eric Holder when his nomination for Attorney General heads up to the Senate.”
That little bit of unsubstantiated (and paranoid) rumor-mongering was met with gasps from the assembled bubble-heads, has since led to a minor pundit storm, and that storm washed Abrams’ flotsam up on the blogospheric beach this morning.
Abrams starts by buying Connolly’s supposition entirely, even though Rove’s only position from which to lead anything is a lead bogeyman to the Dem’s paranoia. Let’s recap, shall we? Rove resigned ages ago, and was a tad tainted, albeit by the extremely tainted Plame Game silliness. His former boss, Pres. Bush, currently carries a political batting average in the double digits, if you’re charitable. Every Republican on the Hill is busy running away from Bush, even if they don’t know where they’re running to quite yet.
And out of this, how exactly will Rove run anything? He does remain an opinion leader of sorts and he has numerous bully pulpits, but the only thing that separates him from any of the other conservative pundits who are piling on Holder is the Darth Rove image the Dems have in their heads. That’s ridiculous, of course, but hardly ridiculous enough to get Abrams this prestigious nomination.
Abrams starts digging his hole by attempting to minimize the crimes of Marc Rich, who Holder famously vetted prior to Bill Clinton’s notorious pardon.
Regrettably, Holder was the official ultimately responsible for vetting President Clinton’s last-minute pardons. By his own admission, he did not pay sufficient attention to the details, and Bill Clinton, at the behest of Marc Rich’s attorney, Scooter Libby, pardoned Rich, a notorious defrauder who had escaped to Switzerland without going to trial or serving a day in prison. In the wake of the Madoff scandal, a fraud that made Marc Rich’s seem like petty larceny, Rove smells blood.
It’s true that Bernard Madoff will be one of the biggest scammers of all time, with a tally in the billions. But there’s apples and oranges at work here. Madoff’s billions are the direct take of a pyramid scheme targeting the ridiculously rich. Clinton pardoned Rich for something else entirely. Among the more notorious of Rich’s crimes were buying oil from the Iranians despite the post-embassy takeover embargo, then marking it up 200%, then selling it to oil-starved Americans, so on that caper he broke the law in order to fleece all of us, as a nation.
Rich was pardoned for failure to pay taxes and doing business with Iran. The fine his company paid the U.S. after Rich fled in 1983 was $200 million - inflate that and you’re probably at half a billion in fines, not total criminal take. Rich’s crimes were hardly petty.
Now Abrams spins his web:
All Rove wants to do, and will succeed at doing, is to elevate public attention to his confirmation hearings where pliant Republicans will ask the same questions about Marc Rich over-and-over-and-over to shine the spotlight on Clinton’s egregious pardon.
If that’s all Rove wants to do, he can retire from the fight now. Holder’s pardons are already in the public domain and will be the fodder of GOP questioning. Whether it’s over-and-over-and-over or not depends on how much the GOP wants to follow the Dem model. Proceeding:
In addition the Republicans will try to pin Holder down on whether he will prosecute the major rogue actors in the Bush/Cheney regime, but he cannot take that bait.
“Major rogue actors in the Bush/Cheney regime?” Where do I start? Regime? Rogue? Sorry, it was a twice-elected administration, not some tin pan regime, and as far as I know there are no outstanding criminal charges against any administration members, now that Libby has been nailed for the high crime of forgetfulness. Abrams suggests Rove is due a pardon, but since Rove hasn’t even been charged with something, that’ll be an interesting pardon.
I don’t get it, but then I’m too sane to come up with Abrams’ ultimate scenario:
Of course, Bush will pardon them anyhow. Or, as I originally predicted, on January 19th, Bush will pardon Cheney and resign, and let Cheney pardon the rest of them, including Bush himself.
I’m not sure what the pardon will be for. Flying the planes into the WTC? Letting aliens impregnate American women? Sneaking into the Library of Congress and shredding the Constitution? Acting on UN and Congressional resolutions against Iraq? Going seven years without another attack on US soil?
Abrams’ solution to this mess is as ridiculous as the rest of his column: Put off the Holder hearings until after the coronation inauguration. As if that would stop the nefarious Rove and his villainous schemes!
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Holder promised senators he would review why career prosecutors in Washington decided not to prosecute the former head of the department’s Civil Rights Division. An inspector general’s report last month found that Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the division, misled lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.
Take the $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network. Please. When it was announced in April by Joe “Oh, It’s Just A Little Lie” Biden, he had a pretty simple - if grammatically challenged - explanation for the grant’s intent: “This is jobs - jobs.”