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Cronies
Thoughts on Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and indicted House leader Tom DeLay

President Bush has pulled a Dick Cheney. In case you’re wondering, that’s not a good thing.

Just as Cheney — now vice-president (and a more loathsome one we haven’t seen since Richard Nixon) — decided after vetting candidates for the nation’s number-two job that he was the best guy for Bush so has the president decided that Harriet Miers, who as White House counsel reviewed the ideological purity of the gang of reactionary and right-wing radicals that Bush has appointed to the federal bench, chose to nominate his judicial vetter-in-chief to the US Supreme Court to fill the vacancy opened by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

It is a sign of how far this nation has moved to the right that O’Connor, the first woman ever appointed to the court — by Ronald Reagan — is now considered a moderate. It is true that she developed an independent and libertarian streak in her last years on Supreme Court, but to consider her anything other than a conservative — albeit one with an open mind — is nothing short of ridiculous.

Conservatism today is indeed ridiculous and alarming and dangerous. The right wing unabashedly promotes the concentration of wealth, taxes the working poor and the middle class while excusing those more affluent from paying their fair share of the cost of a government that gives them favored status, promotes fundamentalist superstition over hard science, fosters intolerance of those who dissent or who are merely different, restricts civil liberties in the name of executive power, and, of course, wages the destructive and ill-conceived war in Iraq — which it lied about to start with.

Miers is a dispiriting nominee for a dispirited nation, a low candidate from a corrupt administration. She’s a Bush crony. In Massachusetts we call such people hacks.

One emerging school of thought holds that, since the right-wing loonies are howling because Miers is not a certified vampire in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and therefore cannot be trusted to accelerate the sucking of what blood is left in the American body politic, that Miers can’t be all bad.

To those optimistic ninnies, like Senate minority leader Harry Reid — an ardent anti-abortionist himself — we offer the counsel of Peter Townsend: "Don’t be fooled again."

Miers is a mediocrity. Unlike Bush’s new Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts — he of the armor-plated résumé, Miers has exhibited no evidence of capacity for conceptual rigor. That’s what Bush — who history will remember as the greatest 19th-century mind to inhabit the 21st- century White House — wants. Besides, one Bush brainiac is enough. Brains must be balanced by belief. And that’s where Miers comes in. She is by all accounts traditional, never married, and lived with her mother until she moved to Washington. She is a true believer, a Roman Catholic who was born again as an evangelical Protestant, a Democrat who converted to Republicanism. In short: a menace who threatens not through intellectual flash or legal filigree, but through the simple fact that she is a Bushie.

Cronyism is the true currency of the Bush administration. The buck rules. From the corrupt contracts given to Dick Cheney’s old employer, Halliburton, to supply, police, and rebuild Iraq (delivered from Saddam into the hands of psychopathic suicide bombers who kill in the name of jihad) to the network of Republican-friendly companies seeking to fatten themselves on the victims of Hurricane Katrina (abandoned by Bush because they were poor, Democrats, or both), the buck rules.

 Determining which comes first: the crony or the buck, is something we’ll leave to the tender mercies of Chief Justice Roberts’s superior legal mind. If Roberts is a fellow traveler, an intellectual crony, and Miers is a personal crony, then recently indicted House majority leader Tom DeLay of Texas, is a gold-plated crony.

DeLay’s cronyism is so magnificent, of such rotten splendor, that it is papal — and not merely presidential — in scope. He seeks a state of universal corruption, where all interests are beholden to the Republicans.

 To that end, DeLay and his merry band of unindicted co-conspirators — which includes such right-wing stalwarts as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform; convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who operates under the cover of his fundamentalist prison ministry (you gotta love those God-fearing Republicans); and a host of others — have schemed to have corporate interests and special-interest groups contribute only to the GOP and use only lobbyists who employ only Republicans. It’s a plot that it is breathtaking in its ambition. Only Colson’s ex-boss, President Nixon, tried something of this magnitude. Screwing the Democrats out of their slice of Washington pork is, well, un-American.

 DeLay has been indicted for a much smaller and ancillary scheme. Those who revel in his misfortune should do so with caution. Texas district attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, has nailed him for an alleged illegality over a mere $190,000 in supposedly misdirected political funds. Earle has been known to use prosecution as a political tool. But if DeLay is convicted, by no means a certainty, there is a very good chance he could win on appeal. If a Bush-appointed state judge doesn’t throw the case out, then a Bush-appointed federal judge might. If the DeLay case should ever make it to the US Supreme Court, then Roberts and, we suppose, Miers will be standing ready. And therein lies the problem. Cronyism: it’s as American as apple pie.


Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
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