Andrew Card Is Nuts

Update: Bush Jacketless In Oval Office: Photo Uncovered After Bush Chief Of Staff Slams Obama's Informal Appearance (SLIDESHOW) (Huffington Post)

So former Bush chief-of-staff Andrew Card thinks the new administration disrespects the oval office?

I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Card is one of the guys who went to the hospital with Gonzales to bully a very ill Attorney General Ashcroft to sign off on something illegal (which even Ashcroft wouldn't do). [James B. Comey blew the whistle.]

They lie, cheat, cause thousands of people to be killed, spy on Americans.

Bush makes a joke of missing WMDs under desk, where could they be, in a total break from empathy from our country's common good, and now Card says Obama should wear a suit coat in the oval office?

I never realized Card was this sick. I thought he may have been one of the middle-bad ones; I was wrong!

Bush Lied, We Do Torture

The New York Times has a blockbuster revealing that as Bush and Company ran around pushing the "we don't torture" line, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other administration toadies were secretly issuing orders expanding the limits of U.S.-sanctioned torture.

Bush and his cronies lied to the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the American people to pursue an anti-human program of torture over the objections of many government attorneys. James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, was derided as a "disloyal" "wimp" for his moral and legal objections.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central
Intelligence Agency.

... Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
... Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.
“For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste — extremely hazardous to their health,” Mr. Horton said.
“If you give the administration what it wants, you’ll lose credibility in the academic community,” he said. “But if you hold back, you’ll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.”
... Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.
But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.
“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

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