[A-List] Don't Fire Gonzales

[tony black]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Greg Palast
To: tal at interlynx.net
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 2:29 PM
Subject: Don't Fire Gonzales


Don’t Fire Gonzales
by Greg Palast
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Before President Bush fired his sorry ass, US Attorney David Iglesias of New 
Mexico, in a last sad attempt to suck up to his Republican padrones, allowed 
his chief mouthpiece, Norm Cairns, to speak with me.  He shouldn’t have.

That was two years back, while I was investigating strange doings in New 
Mexico and Arizona, where, simultaneously, state legislators, Republicans 
all, claimed they had evidence of “voter fraud.”  Psychiatrists call this 
kind of mutual delusional behavior folie a deux.  I suspected something 
else: I smelled Karl Rove.

In the New Mexico legislature, a suburban Albuquerque political hackette, 
Justine Fox-Young (her real name), claimed to have “several” specific cases 
of vote identity rustling.  Like Joe McCarthy waving his list of 
“Communists,” she waived documents of “evidence” of illegal voting on the 
floor of the Legislature.  I called Ms. Fox-Young and asked her to send me 
the papers.

The “evidence” never arrived. Maybe her fax machine was broken. I called 
Justine.

Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered criminals!  Did you turn their names over to 
the US Attorney?

A. Well, no, but someone did.

Whose initials are Karl Rove?

She swore to me that US Attorney Iglesias would back up her story: he was 
investigating the evil voters and was about to indict them.

So I got Iglesias’ guy Norm on the phone.  Was Iglesias prosecuting, or 
actively investigating, one single real case of voter fraud?

Norm went into a lengthy swirly-whirly river of diving, ducking bullshit. I 
dove in.

Me: In other words, you can’t back her story?

Norm: Well, yeah, uh, I guess you’d say that’s true.

I guess I will say that, Norm.  Fox-Young had just plain made it up; fibbed, 
lied, faked the evidence.

There was a multi-state con in operation.  But what was it?  Each of these 
bogus claims of voter fraud was attached to a sales pitch for a state law to 
tighten voter ID requirements — to prevent these ne’er-do-wells from voting 
twice.  In Arizona, one crack-pot Republican legislator, the Hon. Russell 
Pearce, claimed he had evidence that five million Mexicans had illegally 
crossed the border to vote.

The point: Rove knew that a “challenge” operation by the Republican Party, 
run from his office, knocked out 300,000 voters — mainly poor ones, voters 
of color.  His crew wanted to hike that higher.

The notable thing about this crime of voter identity theft is that it doesn’t 
happen.  You are more likely to encounter ballot boxes that spontaneously 
combust.  I found cases of voters struck by lightening — but out of 120 
million votes cast, I couldn’t find a dozen criminal cases of a bandit 
stealing someone’s identity to vote.

Since the Republicans couldn’t find such criminals, they had to make them 
up.  Force prosecutors to bring false charges against innocent voters (one 
did just that in Wisconsin) or at least claim they were hot on the trail of 
the fraudulent voters.

Iglesias, though a Republican, wouldn’t bring bogus charges.  And he wouldn’t 
lie about active investigations that didn’t exist except in Rove’s 
imagination.

That was his mistake.

Rove’s right-hand hit-man, Tim Griffin, added Iglesias to the hit list of 
prosecutors who were cut down on December 7, 2006.

Griffin himself, after the December 7 firings, was appointed by Attorney 
General Gonzales, at Rove’s personal request, to one of the newly-vacated 
slots as US Attorney for Arkansas.  The sleeper cell of Rove-bot US 
attorneys is now in place to bless voter suppression games in 2008.

I’ve previously reported for BBC that Griffin was the Man in the Memos who 
directed the massive, wrongful purge of African-American soldiers in 2004 — 
the ‘caging’ list scam. Based on that expose, voting rights lawyer Robert F. 
Kennedy Jr., said, “Griffin and Rove should be in jail, not in office.” 
That, too is another story — But the important thing to pick up here is:

1. It’s all about the 2008 election.
2. It’s not about Gonzales.

We’ve been here before.  Gonzales is getting Libby’d.  Takes the bullet for 
Karl Rove and the White House.  If you wondered why the Republican jackals 
like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were 
told to.

These guys learned from Richard Nixon.  In 1973, when Nixon was getting 
hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, 
a schmuck named Kleindeist.  Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep 
named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting 
slowly in the wind.”

Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.

Look, I have no sympathy for Alberto the Doomed.  He’s guilty of a crime I 
employed in racketeering cases: “Willful failure to know.”  It’s a kind of 
fraud; Alberto was going way out of his way to not know what he had to know, 
that Rove and the President were toying with prosecutors.

Gonzales is their glove-puppet.  Why fire him?  The nation watches these 
hearings and wants to kill something.  But why shoot the puppet?  It’s time 
to fire the puppeteer.  Eh, Mr. Rove?

**********
This is based on “The Theft of 2008″ from the new, expanded edition of Armed 
Madhouse: From New Orleans to Baghdad - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of 
a White House Gone Wild, released this week by Penguin. Get it here.

For more information on the Armed Madhouse tour, go to www.GregPalast.com










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