Gonzales Nomination: Mercury Rising
From the AP (whole article linked at bottom):
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More than 225 clergy calling themselves Church Folks for a Better America signed a letter to Gonzales calling on him to "denounce the use of torture under any circumstances."
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Sounds fair. After all, the Administration has already backed away from the infamous OLC torture memo of spring 2003, with this new memo. So why shouldn't Gonzales?
The campaign against Gonzales is in a stage that Michael Pertschuk and Wendy Schaetzel -- authors of "The People Rising," an account of the struggle to defeat the Bork Supreme Court nomination -- call "Framing the Debate," which is all a matter of seizing on one or two issues and defining "the mainstream" based solely on those issues, making it easy to portray your target as being (to quote Pres. Bush) on one of the outer banks.
The similarities will abound between Block Bork and Block Gonzales. One thing that happened seventeen years ago that we shouldn't expect to see today is mixed messages from the White House (e.g. an anonymous White House aide told Herman Schwartz that Bork was a "right-wing zealot.") But neither will we see colleagues gushing about Gonzales's immense professional qualifications (he doesn't have much in that department), as they did about Bork.
____
More than 225 clergy calling themselves Church Folks for a Better America signed a letter to Gonzales calling on him to "denounce the use of torture under any circumstances."
____
Sounds fair. After all, the Administration has already backed away from the infamous OLC torture memo of spring 2003, with this new memo. So why shouldn't Gonzales?
The campaign against Gonzales is in a stage that Michael Pertschuk and Wendy Schaetzel -- authors of "The People Rising," an account of the struggle to defeat the Bork Supreme Court nomination -- call "Framing the Debate," which is all a matter of seizing on one or two issues and defining "the mainstream" based solely on those issues, making it easy to portray your target as being (to quote Pres. Bush) on one of the outer banks.
The similarities will abound between Block Bork and Block Gonzales. One thing that happened seventeen years ago that we shouldn't expect to see today is mixed messages from the White House (e.g. an anonymous White House aide told Herman Schwartz that Bork was a "right-wing zealot.") But neither will we see colleagues gushing about Gonzales's immense professional qualifications (he doesn't have much in that department), as they did about Bork.
posted by hellisotherpeople at 3:48 PM
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