No. I won’t. I once promised never to use that word unless it was with the utmost affection.

Let’s just say she wouldn’t have to stoop to crawl beneath a slug and that there’s more primeval ooze in her veins than anything approximating human-type blood. To call her “pond scum” is an insult to pond scum. Why actual Democrats keep electing her is a mystery for the ages.

But Schumer’s worried about the destruction of the Democratic party by Rove/Gonzo USA’s, particularly in the South. If those bogus prosecutions aren’t stopped, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi will be Republican strongholds for the next 20 years.

Maybe I should write a post about this, but Schumer’s a lawyer and what he knows is that if the political anti-Dem persecutions continue, the legal systems in most of the South will be in Pub hands for a long time to come. So will the state election commissions and with them the power to steal elections a la Harris and Blackwell. He doesn’t want that and he’s got a point.

Having said that, I’ll repeat what I said above: the executive power issue trumps that problem as far as I’m concerned, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth taking seriously. And it is almost certainly true that Mukasey will stop the persecution of Dems if he’s AG.

If Mukasey was ‘the guy’, Bush would never have nominated him. The debate over waterboarding was a proxy debate over Executive power; by refusing to condemn waterboarding as torture, Mukasey has essentially indicated that he’s not going to impede the president when it comes to matters of Executive privilege, no matter how many super sekrit assurances offered to Schumer.

And once again the Dems have played the roll of loyal servants.

Fuck them all.

What Mukasey would likely NEVER allow is that the DOJ be used, as it is being used right now, as a political tool to invent evidence for the prosection of Democrats. The very first sentence of Schumer’s op-ed talks about “de-politicizing”, which I suspect Schumer thinks is a much more immediate problem. Don Siegelman is in jail and other bogus investigations have other Democrats’ heads on the DOJ’s chopping block. Torture may be dealt with by other means but only an AG with integrity and grit can clean up the mess Gonzo made.

I’m not convinced he’s right that Mukasey is the guy, and my reservations about M’s bent toward authoritarianism make him a very bad choice in my book. But that doesn’t mean Schumer’s concentration on halting political prosecutions is wrong-headed, only that our priorities differ. He has good reason to be worried about what the DOJ is doing to Democrats around the country and will continue to do if the next AG doesn’t stop it.