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AG Catch-up Post

Well, I’m still trapped in a hotel, with no sign of power to return at home any time soon, so I might as well catch up on the news I’ve missed over the last couple of days.

Let’s start with the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the post of Attorney General.

My initial reaction is still “Even Torture-is-OK Guy is better than Ashcroft”, but when I think about what this means for America it makes my heart sick. The guy who architected the legal doctrine that led to Abu Ghraib is going to me the Attorney General. The guy who outlined the faux legal reasoning to allow Guantanamo is going to be the Attorney General. It’s enough to make me think there’s something to that Gnostic offshoot that thinks God exists, but he’s insane and hates us.

Of course Gonzales’ appointment is essentially Bush putting the Justice Department even more directly under Executive control–Gonzales’ only source of power is his connection to Bush. And of course, it’s also the Repbulicans courting the Latino vote, and I can just see the Democrats falling into the trap of looking like racists for opposing his nomination.

So, besides writing the toture memos, and expressing the opinion that international laws like the Geneva Convention are “quaint”, what’s Gonzales’ history?

Well, you may know that he was general counsel for Enron. (In the reality-based world, that alone would prevent him from ever holding a post, to say nothing of his thoughts on international law and torture.)

If you are an Atlantic subscriber you can read about Gonzales’ role as the author of death penalty memoranda for Bush during his time as legal counselor to the Governor of Texas at this link. For those of you who aren’t subscribers, here’s a salient quote on what the memoranda were:

Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one.

In the article the author goes on to describe what he found when he got copies of these memoranda under a Texas freedom of information statute:

Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant’s claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes.

Interesting.

You might be interested in how Gonzales views traditional legal principlesm such as avoiding ex parte communication, or “the rule of law”,

Just in case you don’t check out that last link, here’s the killer paragraph:

The key 50-page memo was written Aug. 1, 2002, by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. The criminal law, it stated, “does not apply to the president’s detention and interrogation of enemy combatants pursuant to his commander-in- chief authority.”

(Those interested can read the whole report. Also of interest, a memo from Gonzales to Bush, and Powell’s reply to it. We knew Powell was leaving anyway, but anyone want to take odds that Gonzales’ appointment moved up his exit timetable? )

Not that Ashcroft had any great respect for the rule of law either. (Actually even now Ashcroft is pushing his “questioning the president is treason” line by making speeches to the effect that judges who disagree with the administration are traitors, or terrorists, or open the door for baby-eating foreigners or something.)

Speaking of Ashcroft, there’s a great post at TalkLeft reminding us about Ashcroft’s confirmation process, and discussing the likely course of events for Gonzales’, particularly in light of the pending SCOTUS noms. It’s a good read.

But, back to Gonzales, there’s lots of analysis out there. Newsweek has David Cole, a civil liberties expert and professor at Georgetown, looking at Ashcroft and Gonzales. I’m solidly in agreement with Cole’s assessment of Ashcroft as “one of the worst attorney generals we’ve ever had” (although I like SFGate’s phrase “Ashcroft has been a disaster as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer.” even better), and I am scared to read that sometimes Ashcroft was the moderating voice compared to Gonzales.

There is also an analysis at Salon.

Me, I’m still thinking that as terrible as some of this sounds, he might still be better than Ashcroft. Yay for lowering the bar so far that anything seems like “the lesser evil”! (I’m crying on the inside). And, I guess, as long as he’s AG we don’t have to worry about Bush putting him on the Supreme Court bench.

Oh, and you should notice the pattern with this appointment, and others recently announced, that Josh Marshall has noticed over at Talking Points Memo:

So is Bush moving to the right or the center in term two?

Wrong metric. He’s moving to exert greater control.

Look at the pattern.

Neither Ms. Rice nor Mr. Gonzales are the neo-cons’ or the conservatives’ choice for their respective offices-to-be.

In each case they’re acceptable; but no more.

What distinguishes each is their connection to the president, their loyalty and their fealty. Neither has any base in the city or standing anywhere else absent their connection to him. And in appointing them he has placed the State Department and the Justice Department under his direct and unmediated control as surely as the various members of the White House staff already are.

Which is certainly a good thing since if there is one thing this president sorely needs it is more yes-men.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2004 at 1:19 am and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “AG Catch-up Post”

  1. Alex Says:
    November 17th, 2004 at 12:50 am
    1

    The TPM does bring up an interesting point… if that is indeed Bush’s motivation for the appointments, then I wonder what his agenda will be if he is distancing himself from the neo-cons? Less towards the religious base and more towards the corporate?

  2. George Says:
    November 25th, 2004 at 6:14 pm
    2

    I’m pretty sure that this is the plot outline for Star Wars: Episode III.

  3. manoflinux Says:
    November 16th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
    3

    I dont know that there is a branch of gnosticism that believes that but this is where I think you got the idea from.

    Dr Stone, from Philip K. Dick’s Valis, sayeth: “the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as Logos.”

  4. Mr. McLaren Says:
    November 16th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
    4

    It is true that my first encounter with gnosticism came about because of PKD–like my first encounters with a number of heavy philosophical questions. However, in Valis (and a few other places) Dick is definitely building on traditional Gnostic ideas.

    Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia entry on Gnosticism:

    The Classic Gnostic Myth

    Commonly, the gnostic prologue to Genesis describes an unknown God, very different in nature to the orthodox conception of the divine. The latter conception defines God through a series of positives commonly taken to their superlative degrees: as well as being explicitly male, he is omniscient, omnipotent and truly benevolent. The gnostic conception of God is, by contrast, often defined through a string of negatives: he is immovable, invisible, intangible, ineffable; commonly, “he” is seen as being androgynous, a potent symbol for being, as it were, ‘all-containing’. This mode of thinking about God is so important in gnosticism that he is sometimes referred to as “the uncontained”; otherwise he may be referred to as Bythos, the Monad as it is called by Monoimus, or the first Aeon. In essence, gnosticism posits a God that may not be described in any rational sense; it is only possible to say what God isn’t, and the experience of it remains something, again, in defiance of rational description. Orthodox descriptions of God sometimes also employ this sort of language, as in “negative” or “apophatic” theology.

    This original God went through a series of emanations, during which its essence is seen as expanding into many successive “generations” of paired male and female beings, called “aeons.” A frequent complaint concerning gnostic texts is the complexity of their narratives and the numerous characters within them. Some gnostic texts posit as many as twenty of these aeons (Valentinius listed thirty-three such pairs). These should be seen as representative of the various attributes of God, themselves indiscernible when not abstracted from their origin. In this sense, the aeons and their emanation are more akin to a poetic device. They allow an otherwise utterly unknowable God to be discussed in a meaningful way amongst initiates. Collectively, God and the aeons comprise the sum total of the spiritual universe, known as the Pleroma.

    At this point in the myth the universe was still entirely non-material. The increasing fragmentation of the nature of God into more and more aeons led, eventually, to instability within the primordial universe. This growing problem reached its climax with the appearance of the lowest aeon, called Sophia (Gr. “wisdom”). In several versions, Sophia attempts to surmount the rigid hierarchy of the divine nature, trying to approach close to God himself. (Recall that though the aeons comprise God in his totally, they are nevertheless at the same time individual characters abstracted from him, otherwise we would have the paradoxical situation of God divided into many essences.) In other cases, Sophia imitates God in performing an emanation of her own. In both cases, this intransigence causes a crisis within the Pleroma, leading to the creation of Yaldabaoth, a “serpent with a lion’s head” (Apocryphon of John). This figure is commonly known as the Demiurge, after the figure in Plato’s Timaeus (Gr. demiurgos - “one who shapes” (typical translation); “Tame Worker / One Who Domesticates” (literal translation)). This being is at first hidden by Sophia, but later escapes, stealing a portion of divine power from her in the process.

    Using this stolen power, Yaldabaoth creates a material world in imitation of the divine Pleroma. To complete this task, he spawns a group of entities known collectively as Archons, “petty rulers” and craftsmen of the physical world. Like him they are commonly depicted as theriomorphic, having the heads of animals. At this point the events of the Gnostic narrative join with the events of Genesis, with the Demiurge and his Archontic cohorts fulfilling the role of the creator. The Demiurge declares himself to be the only god, and that none exist superior to him.

    From here the events follow in the familiar fashion. God creates Adam, during the process unwittingly transferring into Adam’s body the portion of power stolen from Sophia. He then creates Eve from Adam’s rib; the two are tempted by the serpent, and fall. However, the addition of the prologue radically alters the nature of this event; rather than attributing the fall to human weakness, gnostics locate the ultimate cause of the fall in the instability of the divine nature itself. The ‘fall’ of Adam and Eve thus becomes something of a redemption, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden becomes a heroic, salvific figure rather than an adversary of humanity. Eating the fruit of Knowledge is the first act of human salvation from cruel, oppressive powers.

    As may be gleaned from the above, most Gnostics identified the Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament. They rejected the Old Testament and Judaism and sometimes celebrated those who were rejected by the Old Testament God, such as Cain. Some Gnostics were believed to identify the Demiurge with Satan; this perception contributed to the suspicion with which many Christians regarded them.

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