After defrauding investors and backing corporate killers, Miers moved to the White House, where, as the Los Angeles Times reports, she became Bush’s chief gatekeeper for his most important briefings, including the August 6, 2001 number entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” – you know, the explicit, hair-raising report that somehow lulled the entire Bush team into a warm, comfy sleep until September 11. According to Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman, Miers then became “heavily involved in the War on Terror” that followed those fortuitous attacks. (“Through my tears, I see opportunity,” as Bush declared repeatedly in those palmy days of 90 percent approval ratings).
This week Mehlman has been on the horn to Bush’s hard-right “base” (although we prefer the more eloquent Arabic term for this loyal band: “al Qaeda“), assuring them that Miers “will not interfere with the administration’s management of the War on Terrorism,” The Hill reports. He said Miers believes that neither the courts nor Congress should “micromanage” the Terror War, i.e., put fetters on the unrestrained powers of the Commander-in-Chief to kill, incarcerate and torture whom he sees fit. This is particularly important now, as the revelations of blood-soaked atrocity in Bush’s prisons have grown so mountainous and foul that even the rubber-stamps in the Senate were forced this week to approve a cosmetic and meaningless measure to set guidelines for interrogating captives. (The bill leaves a gaping black hole for unregulated CIA interrogations, however, and will in any case be killed or watered down to even thinner gruel by the more zealous Bushist cadres in the House.)
In fact, as White House counsel, Miers “provided the president with guidance on the legal parameters” for the Terror War, Mehlman told the faithful. In other words, Miers helped draw up the “justifications” for torture, rendition and aggressive war which she will now be ruling upon at the Supreme Court. Oh, there’ll be a hot time in the old gulag when Harriet joins Jughead on the bench!
But who cares? Most of the wiggly, giggly Democratic “opposition” – which sent Jughead over the top with a big bipartisan cushion – is already rolling over and playing dead for Miers; in fact, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid actually recommended that Bush appoint this torture-enabling, worker-whipping political fixer to the nation’s highest court. The whole American leadership class has given up democratic government for the brutal absurdities of junta rule: cronyism, conquest, corruption and moral collapse.