Lieberman for U.S. Attorney General...ew...and yet...hm.

[WilliamPitt]

Ew.

Serious ew.

Great green gobs of greasy grimy ew.

But even with all that ew, I can't avoid seeing a little bit of upside to the idea.

1. Lieberman is really bad, yes, but compared to the kind of wretched nominee that Bush is almost certain to barf up, Joe is a six-scoop chocolate-fudge ice cream sundae with whipped cream and sprinkles. He's a sundae brought to you on a bright red wagon. A red wagon towed by twenty gleefully giggling adorable bunnies. Twenty bunnies dressed in matching pink fuzzy kilts...who each have two of those little googly-eye stickers on their puffy bunny tails.

Perhaps I overstate the matter juuuust a tad...but you catch my drift. Ashcroft...Gonzales...and now this trial balloon for Ted "Never Heard Of The Arkansas Project" Olson. There's ew, and there's EW, and then there's that troika of doom. No 'ew' exists that can properly describe them.

It's a testament to just how bad things have gotten that Ashcroft actually came off as the fa-chrissake HERO in the NSA spying scandal, defender of the confetti-fied remains of the Bill of Rights, this far and no farther said John from his sickbed...oh, but forget about that American citizen from Chicago named Padilla who got stuffed in a box for three years, who was the citizen they used as a test case for how far they could go in depriving an American of his rights...

...Indeed, it was Johnny-Boy who red-lined Habeus in his final draft of the Patriot Act, and Senator Byrd actually had to make sure Habeus was un-red-lined before they passed the thing, and so it is an historical fact that our most essential and fundamental legal principle owes its survival beyond 2001 to the state of West Virginia, a state whose formation came roughly 800 years after Habeus was first inscribed into the Magna Carta.

As for Gonzo...I just can't...I mean, Jesus H. Christ on a sidecar, it would be one thing if he'd been some wild-eyed fanatical Straussian just dying to test-drive some of his "theories," because at least that would mean there was a mind at work, even a deranged one. This guy just wasn't...anything.

I know that Nazi analogies are totally facile, but I can't avoid this one. It is almost impossible to believe human beings could commit the blank-eyed evil that the Nazis did. Didn't they have any sense of right and wrong? Didn't they have...anything? How could people do that? Well, consider Gonzo. Yes sir, torture sir, spy on Americans sir, whatever you say sir. If you need proof of the blank-eyed evil that was the Reich, he's a fair facsimile. The bloodless robot who follows orders.

And the really gruesome part? I really don't think he actually remembers any of it. "I don't recall" was the stone truth. Why should he? He wasn't wrestling with right and wrong, laws or statutes, regulations or expectations, moral codes or constitutional allegiance. There were only the orders, recieved and executed and done. A pistol doesn't remember the bullets it fires, doesn't remember the lives it takes. A pistol follows orders from the trigger finger. A pistol is a machine. With one blank eye.

So, yeah, the needle on my Detest-O-Meter definitely stands at attention when contemplating Joe Lieberman, but the hatred and dread and horror I have for the AGs who have been, and the potential of some non-Lieberman to be...well, I just can't get that geeked up about Joe.

Plus.

2. This is a maybe, but if Joe joins the Bush administration, he will have to give up his Senate seat, and I don't forsee him having an easy time winning it back again after crossing to the Dark Side like that...oh, and Ned Lamont might make it even harder for him.

It's a hell of a thing. Ew. But a much more tolerable kind of ew.

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of...

*smash smash smash smash*

'Scuse me. I just stood up for Lieberman. Something had to be destroyed. I really liked that ashtray, too.

Thoughts?