Meet your new thread, same as the old thread.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You're like a Marxist in your capacity to eliminate complexity and detail in order to reduce things to a simple, deterministic world view. I was wondering whether you would respond with anything about what actually happens, but I'm not surprised that you didn't.

We all know about issues between Bush and the CIA since 2000. This doesn't mean that the CIA is controlled by or answering to Democrats. They have other reasons to be pissed, one of which is that the White House ruined the career of one of their people to score political points. That has everything to do with the CIA's institutional interests, and nothing to do with whatever you mean by "Democrats in power" -- there weren't any in Washington at the time we're talking about, a fact that either eludes you or is too inconvenient for your "it's all politics, all the time" worldview.

Which Democrats told the CIA to do something it didn't want to do anyway? What was their leverage? You had Republican congressional leadership that wasn't letting House Democrats hold meetings in conference rooms, so I'm curious about the "power" you have in mind. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee was Jay Rockefeller, who since 2000 gladly let himself get rolled on just about every occasion where it was possible, and some where it probably wasn't but he did it anyway. What "power" did he exert over the CIA.

And then there's DOJ. Tell me about the supernatural political powers possessed by Democrats that let them force John Ashcroft's DOJ to open an investigation, and then to get him to recuse himself, and then to get Fitzpatrick to get appointed by James Comey.

Did you even know who James Comey was? Or is your commitment to the idea that it's all political so profound that you can just repeat that mantra without knowing much of anything about what actually happened.

Fitzpatrick then got Republican-appointed judges to preside over a jury trial -- the unanimous jurors who voted to convict were clearly the pawns of unnamed but resourceful Democratic politicians who bent their feeble minds to the interests of the Democratic party, as we all know that only a partisan could look at evidence and decide that it shows anything beyond a reasonable doubt, right? -- and to affirm the conviction. Never mind that these judges had the sort of connections and careers that got them appointed to the bench by Republican presidents, and never mind Article III, which gives them life tenure -- you just know that these judges, too, were acting because of some sort of pressure from Democratic politicians. Do tell.

At other times, you are happy to post here about how useless and hapless the Democratic Party is, a party which didn't do much else to control the actions of the Bush Administration over the last several years. Yet here they had amazing powers.

eta: Sorry, no blog posts or evidence -- I figured you would more appreciate whatever rhetorical flair I could muster.

I think what Sebby meant was the Dems and its press created this reality where the WH was behaving so badly overall, and then on this out 'ole no tits, that prosecutions had to happen, and once started a patsy had to be found.