Tag: Karl Rove

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (March 26, 2015)

CREDIT: Reuters | Lee Celano

Reuters | Lee Celano

Robert Durst

HBO struck gold with the six-part documentary, The Jinx:
The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Especially during the jaw-dropping finale, when the alleged triple-murderer was heard off-camera, muttering to himself into a hot microphone what sounded like a confession. Durst’s arrest the day after the show’s finale created such white-hot news coverage that I don’t think I’d be revealing any secrets to offer a short synopsis. Durst is the estranged heir to one of the richest real-estate firms in New York, which manages 1 World Trade Center, among other high-rent properties. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million. In 1982, Durst’s first wife disappeared and her body was never found. Though suspected of murder, Durst remained free until the investigation was reopened in 2000.

The day before Durst’s closest confidant was to be interviewed about the case by prosecutors in Los Angeles, she was found murdered execution-style in her home. Fleeing to Galveston, Texas, Durst rented a $300-a-month room and disguised himself as a mute woman.

In 2001, Durst was arrested for killing his 71-year-old neighbor and dismembering the corpse, which he placed in several garbage bags and scattered in Galveston Bay. Celebrity attorney Dick DeGuerin, who not-so-successfully represented David Koresh during the Waco standoff, admitted that Durst cut up the body, but said that it was postmortem, after a struggle over a gun. The jury decided that Durst acted in self-defense when the gun went off, so the slicing and dicing was moot, and he got off. They never found the head.

Durst agreed to take part in hours of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, ostensibly to deflect blame and set the record straight. In the series’ final episode, after being confronted with damning evidence, Durst retired to the men’s room, forgetting he was still wearing a live microphone and said, “There it is. I’m caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” The day after the final episode aired, Durst was arrested in a New Orleans hotel with $40,000 in cash, a loaded revolver, his passport and original birth certificate, an over-the-head latex mask, and five ounces of pot.

He will most assuredly be arraigned in Los Angeles for murder, so if you enjoyed the documentary, just wait until the trial. Some of the greatest entertainment L.A. produces comes from their live broadcasts of criminal trials. Look at what they’ve given us over the years: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the cops who beat Rodney King, Phil Spector, and Dr. Conrad Murray. But the Robert Durst show will be the trial of this early century. This will be too salacious not to televise.

HBO’s ratings were far too good not to continue this series. We know that we live in a violent country and that there are killers who walk among us — some of them mass murderers. The Durst case took over three decades to unravel, which proves that justice is sometimes late in arriving, but you never know when it will come knocking at your door.

The authorities already know the identities of some others who have committed terrible atrocities, and yet they walk free. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and Tenet. They met in secrecy, concocting a story to sell to the American people about why the Iraq War was absolutely necessary on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction, a term of their own invention.

They invaded and occupied a nation that had not harmed us, then sent over the U.S. Viceroy, “Jerry” Bremer, who disbanded the Iraqi army and barred former members of Saddam’s political party from government, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of men out of work. These two dumbass decisions led directly to insurgency, chaos, sectarian civil war, and the birth of ISIS. The cost of the Iraq War is immeasurable in both dollars and human lives. So where are all the warmongers now? They’re all wealthy and serve on corporate boards and think tanks. Some are professors at prestigious universities. Bremer lives in Vermont, painting rural landscapes while dabbling in French cuisine. Cheney made a fortune in “blind trust” stocks from no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The rest advise the current Republican Party. No one but Cheney’s flunky, Scooter Libby, ever faced criminal charges concerning the war, but rumblings about legal recourse have been growing louder across the globe.

In 2012, the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush, Cheney, and six others in absentia for war crimes. Torture victims told of mistreatment by U.S. soldiers and contractors who used some of the same practices that Japanese were executed for after WWII. Transcripts of the trial were sent to the International Criminal Court, which may never act, but the Durst case proved there’s no statute of limitations on atrocities.

Then, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, I know of a cozy, tropical prison down in Cuba that’s just perfect for detaining war criminals. Imagine the ratings if they televised that trial.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Republicans Adrift

On November 11th, a mere five days after the presidential election, the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam pushed off from Fort Lauderdale for a Caribbean jaunt. Aboard were nearly 600 emotionally tattered Republicans, most of whom had been expecting a Republican victory of Rovian proportions — surely they had all read Karl’s prediction in The Wall Street Journal — and now were about to cruise 750 miles to nowhere, just like the party they so adored. The Nieuw Amsterdam was 86,000 tons of painful metaphor.

The cruise was sponsored by National Review, for years the most important and probably the most readable journal in all of American conservatism. As with other such magazine jaunts, a group of columnists and other well-known movement types get piped aboard so that along with the flambéed everything comes a dessert of political instruction, faux insider stuff, and the usual warnings that civilization (as we know it) is coming to an end.

The difference between this cruise and others like it was the (paying) presence of Joe Hagan, a writer for New York magazine. To his considerable credit, Hagan abstained from shooting these particular fish in their barrel and instead portrayed them as dismayed and somewhat disoriented refugees from an America that used to be. Not only had they been unprepared for Mitt Romney’s loss, but it was dawning on them that their tribe — mostly affluent, elder whites — had lost the election as well as the demographic battle that had preceded it.

“Minorities came out like crazy,” Kevin Hassett, a former Romney adviser, told them. “White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-Americans voting than they expected.” Imagine!

Who “they” might be is not exactly clear. But what is clear is that to the cruising Republicans there is something weirdly topsy-turvy about minorities gaining the political clout they once held in perpetual trust. Suddenly, the GOP must entice them to vote Republican. Scott Rasmussen, the GOP pollster who thought better of Romney’s chances than did the voters, put it this way: “You show them that you really care; you talk to them as grown-ups on a range of issues.”

A menacing sense of foreboding permeates Hagan’s article. The passengers both fear and hate Barack Obama. To them, he is the nightmare president — allegedly alien in outlook, morality, and economic approach. An economic cataclysm is imminent, and the nation has wandered into an icky swamp of immorality. “I’m afraid,” a passenger told Hagan. “Write that. We’re scared to death.”

I chortle not. I was once a National Review subscriber, although never a conservative. In its infancy and for years afterward, the magazine was bursting with ideas. The writing was often fresh and engaging — Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Garry Wills were contributors — and liberalism, to which I also subscribed, was already showing signs of intellectual exhaustion.

Now, though, it is conservatism that is both intellectually exhausted and nearly indefensible. It is the movement of the ideologically ossified, of gun zealots and homophobes, of the immigrant-phobic and the adamantly selfish. It insists that government must be small (an impossibility), education must be local (a stupidity), and that debt, no matter what the reason, is immoral and reckless. The movement has lost its reliable monster. Godless communists have been replaced by the church ladies of Planned Parenthood. History giggles.

Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land. In 2008, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wrote about the voyage of the M.S. Oosterdam, which chugged up the Alaska coast carrying a tour group from The Weekly Standard. At Juneau, conservative notables, including Fox News commentator Fred Barnes, lunched with the governor, Sarah Palin — and, as men often do on shore leave, swooned. Her remarkable qualities — “how smart Palin was,” according to Barnes — and her considerable beauty left most of them a bit addled. A buzz went up. The zeitgeist was alerted. In due course, she was John McCain’s running mate. Only the voters saved us from a debacle.

The National Review cruise encountered no such star of tomorrow. Instead, the emphasis was on yesterday. These passengers were people who had a sense of possession about America. It was once theirs. It once looked like them and acted like them and thought like them. No more. In more ways than one, they were out to sea.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It would be very easy to gloat. It would be a no-brainer to point out that Karl Rove finally got what has been coming to him his entire political career when he miscalculated everything but the time of day and wasted all those millions of dollars he raised to get Mitt Romney elected.

It would be easy to make fun of the extreme reactions to Romney’s loss of the presidential election from those who threw themselves onto the ground screaming and crying and declaring that the United States of America is now dead. It would be easy to attack the 22-year-old California woman who made headlines, got the attention of the Secret Service, and got fired from her job for posting on her Facebook page, “Another 4 years of this [N-word]. Maybe he will get assassinated this term,” and told a Fox News crew, “I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. The assassination part is kind of harsh. I’m not saying like I would go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen, I don’t think I’d care one bit.”

It would be easy to shoot all these writhing fish in their backward barrels. Instead, I’m going to focus on these words from President Barack Obama’s victory speech:

“America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.”

I know I am walking on clouds right now, but those are three of the most important sentences I have heard a president speak in my lifetime. And it shows that America, by re-electing Obama, has hopefully tipped the scales in moving forward to make the United States what it set out to be from day one: a country where everyone is treated as equal, something that for more than 200 years has been anything but the case.

I just hope that those Republican politicians in power who blatantly and unapologetically refused to work with him on anything and held America hostage for four years by freezing any hopes of getting the economy up and going (which he did despite their hatred of him) will finally realize that those days have to be over, because the majority of the American people are just a little bit smarter than they gave them credit for and can no longer be treated like brainwashed lemmings while corporate America and the far right wing stand guard over social progress. It looks like maybe, just maybe, some of them are beginning to realize that the old blue mare ain’t what she used to be. At least I hope so.

To Mitt Romney, I would say, Okay, Mitt, for six years you’ve been a broken record, constantly talking about how you can create millions and millions of jobs. So now is the time to put your gargantuan stash of money where your mouth is. You can’t do it as president, but if you really can do it and weren’t just blowing smoke up everyone’s ass all this time, sit down with President Obama and go about making it happen. Establish something akin to the Clinton Global Initiative and focus on creating jobs in the United States. Work with him as a private citizen and save some face. Make it your life’s calling and stop worrying about what people do in the bedroom and what women do with their own bodies. It’s time to man up and — selflessly — do what you’ve been promising.

To President Obama: Embrace Romney in this respect. Give him a chance. I know you are still going to face a lot of stubborn Tea Party resistance no matter what you do or say, and that may never change, because so many of them are incapable of coming up with a thought that resembles compromise, but give it a whirl. See what happens. And then use your executive privilege to make sure that those three important sentences in your victory speech come to fruition.

Karl Rove, don’t go away mad; just go away. You are through. Retire and collect guns or something. No one needs you anymore. Not only did the majority of the people elect Barack Obama in 2008, but they also “re-elected” him against great odds last Tuesday. Take a hint. It’s a new, welcome, hopeful, inclusive, fairer, mind-bogglingly happy day for anyone with a heart, a soul, and an open mind.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Politics and Justice

Laymen (heck, reporters too) sometimes confuse the various kinds of attorneys general in the U.S. Justice Department.

There is the attorney general of the United States in Washington, D.C. That would be, most recently, Alberto Gonzales, who took office in 2005 and resigned this week.

There is the United States attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, a position appointed by the president. That would be David Kustoff.

And there are assistant United States attorneys in each state. Some of them are career prosecutors. That would include Tim DiScenza, who prosecuted and convicted John Ford and the Tennessee Waltz defendants.

Then there is Bud Cummins.

Cummins used to be the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. He came over to Memphis a few years ago and prosecuted former Shelby County medical examiner O.C. Smith. But his real claim to fame is getting fired by Karl Rove, adviser to President George Bush.

Cummins is one of the “fired U.S. attorneys” that cost Gonzales his job. He was asked to quit on June 5th, 2006, so that former Rove aide J. Timothy Griffin could take his place. He left last December, and he started appearing on CNN early in 2007, when Democrats went public with their charges that Bush and Rove were trying to politically influence the Justice Department. Cummins is a Republican, but he was deemed less politically useful than Griffin, who has since been replaced, too.

Cummins heard about the Gonzales resignation Monday morning.

“I can honestly say I don’t take any personal satisfaction in it,” he told the Flyer this week.

“It’s a sad story,” Cummins said. “There are probably a thousand reasons to admire Gonzales but also a great number of reasons to be disappointed in him. That cost him his credibility in a job where credibility is mandatory.”

Cummins, now working as a consultant in Arkansas, declined to speak about Tennessee Waltz because he is not familiar with the facts in much detail. But he doesn’t think the prosecutions of Ford and others are tainted.

“I know the quality of the professionals actually pursuing the individual investigations,” he said. “I am not concerned that whatever political pressure was brought to bear has caused professional prosecutors to deviate from the nonpartisan pursuit of cases. But it has created an appearance of impropriety. And career professionals are paying a price for that.”

Cummins said he never had any contact with Gonzales before or after June 2006, when he was notified that he was being replaced.

So, does that suggest that the attorney general of the United States and the president and his advisers take a hands-off approach to U.S. attorneys in Tennessee and Arkansas? No, it does not. That would defy common practice and common sense.

Kustoff, who replaced Terry Harris in 2005 after Tennessee Waltz broke in the news, is a former Bush campaign organizer in Tennessee. It is common practice for presidents to appoint U.S. attorneys from their own political party, but they generally do it at the beginning of their terms, not in the middle.

Common sense suggests that back in 2003, when the Tennessee Waltz began, the attorney general (John Ashcroft at the time) was apprised of a sting operation targeting state lawmakers in Tennessee. And that Gonzales was apprised when most of them turned out to be black Democrats.

At a press conference following the Ford sentencing, DiScenza said he has had no personal contact with Gonzales. Kustoff and the FBI special agent in charge, My Harrison, wouldn’t say whether they were in contact with Gonzales or his assistants. They all said Ford’s pending federal trial in Nashville is “not our case.”

But that case cuts to the heart of Ford’s consulting business with TennCare providers, and that is a matter of great local interest.

The public deserves better answers. As Cummins said, there is an appearance of impropriety. Memphis does not exist in a vacuum apart from Nashville and Washington. And the feds are short-changing us on the story.

John Branston is a Flyer senior editor.