Getting Away With It

Gwen Ifill was slimed by Don Imus ten years ago, and she weighed in on his firing today on Meet the Press. What's striking about Ifill's appearance is that she actually calls out Tim Russert and David Brooks, one being the show's host and the other a fellow guest at Russert's table, and while that actual face-to-face call for responsibility is rare enough in today's media, she goes on to delineate the central political issue of our time:

You know, it’s interesting to me. This has been an interesting week. The people who have spoken, the people who issued statements and the people who haven’t. There has been radio silence from a lot of people who have done this program who could have spoken up and said, I find this offensive or I didn’t know. These people didn’t speak up. Tim, we didn’t hear from you. David, we didn’t hear from you. What was missing in this debate was someone saying, you know, I understand that this is offensive. You know, I have a 7-year-old god daughter. Yesterday she went out shopping with her mom for high-Thetop basketball shoes so she can play basketball. The offense, the slur that Imus directed at me happened more than 10 years ago. I would like to think that 10 years from now, that Asia isn’t going to be deciding that she wants to get recruited for the college basketball team or be a tennis pro or go to medical school and that she is still vulnerable to those kinds of casual slurs and insults that I got 10 years ago, and that people will say, I didn’t know, or people will say, I wasn’t listening. A lot of people did know and a lot of people were listening and they just decided it was okay. They decided this culture of meanness was fine — until they got caught. My concern about Mr. Imus and a lot of people and a lot of the debate in this society is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they are sorry that someone catches them. When Don Imus said this about me when I worked here at NBC, when I found out about it, his producer called because Don said he wants to apologize. Well, now he says he never said it. What was he apologizing for? He was apologizing for getting caught, not apologizing for having said it in the first place.

Ah, Gwen. And on the day when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had published maybe the most qualifier-laden guest pieces ever to appear on The Washington Post editorial page. As one of Josh Marshall's readers reminds us, the heavily-rehearsed Gonzo is headed to Capitol Hill this week to lie, and everybody knows it:

As far as I can tell, this is a universal assumption. The Republicans are rooting for Mr. Gonzales to be successful in his perjury, to tell a coherent story that his enemies cannot break down. The Democrats are rooting the other way, off course. They’re hoping that their ace interrogators will be able to shoot enough holes in Mr. Gonzales’ story that they can destroy his credibility. But nobody seems to find it shocking or tragic that the Attorney General of the United States is going to lie to congress. . .

For all their jibberjabber about personal responsibility, the Republican Party takes absolutely none of it, especially the Bush/Cheney gang and their network of henchmen. Anything to protect the absolute power of three baroquely corrupt men, Richard Bruce Cheney, Karl Christian Rove and, most crucially for their cause, George Walker Bush Jr. They either destroy or conceal evidence of involvement. While Karl Rover burns the email evidence, El Presidente's fingers never touch a keyboard -- he does only verbal. You know, like a mafia boss at the "club."

I've already started beating the drum for dusting off the old Nixon question, a.k.a. "What did the President know and when did he know it?", now look and see, he's right there at the center of the Prosecutor Purge, putting out the hit as deniably as possible, the Don of America, for Sen. Peter Domenici (R-AZ):

In the spring of 2006, Domenici told Gonzales he wanted Iglesias out.

Gonzales refused. He told Domenici he would fire Iglesias only on orders from the president.

At some point after the election last Nov. 6, Domenici called Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and told him he wanted Iglesias out and asked Rove to take his request directly to the president.

Domenici and Bush subsequently had a telephone conversation about the issue.

The conversation between Bush and Domenici occurred sometime after the election but before the firings of Iglesias and six other U.S. attorneys were announced on Dec. 7.

Iglesias' name first showed up on a Nov. 15 list of federal prosecutors who would be asked to resign. It was not on a similar list prepared in October.

Will W. himself get away with it? Maybe, just maybe, not so fast. As Josh Marshall himself writes:

No one disputes that Domenici's call to Iglesias was at best inappropriate. But there's been a lack of direct evidence that Iglesias's refusal to bow to political pressure led directly to his firing. Now we have that evidence. And it's not Kyle Sampson or even Alberto Gonzales whom Domenici went to to get sign off for Iglesias's ouster. It was right to the president. And the available evidence now points strongly to the conclusion that the final decision to fire David Iglesias came from the President of the United States.

Doesn't it seem, like, the least coincidental programming of all time that The Sopranos' final nine episodes just kicked off?