The Bush administration's rogue members had seemed so invincible up until now. But their wrongheaded political machinations are unraveling.
And to think that my home state of Alabama could be where it all begins.
It begins with video of former Democratic governor Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy traipsing across television screens all across here in Alabama, heading back and forth to court.
Scrushy, since those first court visits in 2005, has been convicted of bribery based on supposed campaign donations to Siegelman in return for political favors. Siegelman himself had received seven years and a $50,000 fine in his conviction - a sentence that many politics-observers say is highly excessive for the crime for which Siegelman was convicted.
The other problem with these criminal prosecution proceedings?: They resulted in more than likely false convictions founded on calculatedly false information. Also, prosecutors have been accused of having had evidence that proved Siegelman's innocence, but refused to turn it over to Siegelman's defense team.
There is compelling reason to believe that these proceedings were the result of manufactured circumstances set into motion by a conclave of Republicans, all of which are linked to Karl Rove.
The reason for the political hit-job done on Siegelman? Siegelman had a decidedly well-earned grip on politics in this mostly Republican state and the Republicans in this town wanted him out of the way for their own political gain. He was the one Democrat they always lost to - no matter if it was for the position of Alabama's Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, or Lieutenant Governor.
So the Republicans enlisted the snake himself, Karl Rove, to make Siegelman - how should I put it? - no longer politically viable and/or available.
There is even one witness that was reported by the media to have been willing to testify that she was recruited for and/or overheard talks about the plot.
Additionally, according to various news sources, Siegelman had testified against a pal of Karl Rove's on a separate case of a Republican's possible political misconduct. So Rove's other friend, his business associate Bill Canary, enlisted his U.S. attorney wife Leura Canary to begin an investigation of Siegelman.
Together, all of these political players - plus a couple of other peripheral characters - plotted and planned trumped up charges against Democrat former governor and their mutually despised political rival Don Siegelman.
Now, House and Senate investigation committees have subpoenaed Rove to appear before them in their search for the truth. The House committee had subpoenaed Rove for a hearing to occur on July 10th, but its focus is different than that of the Senate's. The Senate is targeting the entire Bush administration and its possibly illegal political firings of U.S. attorneys to further their mission in deceiving the public in regards to the Iraq war and other related issues.
The House wants to know only specifically about Rove's role in Siegelman's prosecution.
You wouldn't know by his behavior these days that Karl Rove even had subpoenas to appear in front of Senate and House investigation committees. He's on Fox News as an "objective" pundit, with all the smugness of a man guilty of committing crimes with impunity. He has been legally dodging the subpoenas, but Conyers and several other House members are working overtime to make him appear before the committees. Rove believes he is above the law and he has been for at least five years.
Because this isn't the first time Rove has aided and abetted something that was quite possibly illegal for political revenge.
Joseph Wilson had been on the receiving end of political sabotage and personal destruction by Rove, and so was his wife. Valerie Plame's name has repeatedly been suggested to have been leaked to the press by Rove because Wilson had discovered, then publicly repeated statements that he had not found any evidence whatsoever that Iraq was planning to buy uranium from Africa.
Wilson's findings were some of those pesky facts that stood in the way of the Bush administration's efforts to convince the unwitting public that America needed to invade Iraq.
And a CIA operative's name, Wilson's wife's name of Valerie Plame, was leaked to the public, effectively ending her career and punishing Wilson for his very consistent and public declarations of his opposition to the war - as Wilson had found no evidence that what the Bush administration was saying about the Iraq-Africa link was true while on a mission for which the CIA had recruited him to complete at the request of Dick Cheney.
Thus, an illegal act may have been perpetrated by Karl Rove for the purpose of political sabotage and deceiving America's citizens.
To get to President Bush, you have to get the smaller fish whose crimes are just as egregious as Bush's. Karl Rove is one of those fishes, and with a possible indictment and then conviction of him on charges resulting from the Siegelman investigations, we'll have that first splash to the first waves in proceedings to impeach President George Bush.
This is a convoluted mess that may suggest to some that the chances of an impeachment as a result of Rove's fall would be tenuous at best. However that's how the Bush administration has operated thus far: they are so far removed, so distant from the actual acting out of the crimes they orchestrate, that they avoid the consequences for them.
But things can work its way up the food chain this time because Karl Rove as The Deputy White House Chief of Staff is a lot closer to Bush than I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby ever was. If Congress, with a Democrat President at the helm, just take time to dig through the muck and mire, they may actually come up with the gold nugget of President Bush in the end.
See, Karl Rove's possible smaller-scale, unethical and plausibly illegal actions are just a minute part of the picture. Once the members of the House and Senate investigation committees step back and look at the whole mural - and not at just the figures painted into only their own scenes - then they will see the atrocity of how this war in Iraq was commenced.
To force the Bush administration to face the consequences of their possibly illegal and deceptive politics is like playing a chess game. Just as they placed all of their board pieces, moved all of their pawns into the right places to lead us into an unjustified war, the next move would belong to the government under a Democrat President.
Bush sent young men and women overseas to fight in an immoral, possibly illegal and now intractable war, but perhaps we will soon watch him fight in a very legitimate war waged against his political life and presidential legacy.
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