The nice polite ones are the flowers of corruption.
Posted by olvlzl
The story about the release of those FBI files on William Rehnquist was disturbing, the drug addiction and the psychosis were bad enough but they were far from the worst. The revelations that the Nixon and Reagan administrations actively used the FBI in an attempt to keep information about Rehnquist from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the public in order to place him on the court and install him as Chief Justice are even worse. These files and very likely the hundreds of pages which were withheld from the disclosure, - and lets do mention the entire section which “could not be found” - would have been read by members of those administrations. Such sensitive files would not have been left to any but the highest and most powerful members of the administrations. They actively used the FBI to discredit people who likely would have testified that Rehnquist was deeply involved with efforts to prevent members of minorities from voting and concealed information that Rehnquist, in keeping with his life as a racist thug, lived in a house covered by an illegal and racist covenant. Rehnquist lied under oath about these and members of both administrations certainly knew that the man who they were placing on the highest court was guilty of perjury and worse. John Bolton appears to be a logical person to have had intimate knowledge of them. Strom Thurmond, who the Republicans put in charge of the Senate Committee, was apparently an active participant in the intimidation.
The most disturbing part of it isn't that Rehnquist was given this much power while drugged and deluded, it was that even though the press knew about the racial thuggery and there were persistent rumors of serious psychological problems, they covered it up year after year. The people who pretend to be the last and best hope of democracy covered up for a seriously incapacitated Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The same people who studiously reported every single lie that the Republican establishment cooked up* about even the most minor players in the Carter and Clinton administrations and the Democratic side of the congress couldn’t be bothered to follow up on why and Associate Justice who was made the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was plainly mentally ill.
And it wasn’t just them, it must have been a considerable part of the Washington and legal establishment who thought their class loyalty was more important than the integrity of the United States Supreme Court. With all the members of administrations who must have known, all the members of the bar, all the court clerks, all the Senators and their staffers, all of those privy to reliable gossip by these and, in the end, the other members of the Supreme Court itself, none of them had the devotion to public service to blow the whistle on a man who had the ability to distort the constitution and laws of the United States. The only part of the record that has been entirely clear during this time is that William Rehnquist was bent on doing as much damage to the freedoms and civil rights of Americans and to their ability to govern themselves as he could manage in his debilitated state.
That the scores if not hundreds of officially respectable members of the establishment didn’t reveal these horrible and entirely relevant facts over those three decades should stand as a hands down case that they are the putrid, artificial flowers of a corrupt system. Their devotion to the rotten establishment and to their own, personal, interest disqualifies them from respect or positions of power. I’ll bet you that of any eight people you found in the local homeless shelter presented with similar facts one of them would have done the responsible thing.
* One of the more bizarre things I heard on the radio this week was Marvin Kalb, being honored by the National Press Club with its 2006 Fourth Estate Award, in a speech decrying the death of serious news in the United States, tipping his hat to Matt Drudge. Marvin Kalb thinks enough of Republican gossip monger, Matt Drudge to read his blatantly Republican propaganda and to mention him on an occasion like this.