Yesterday, US Attorney General Eric Holder was being questioned by Representative Louie Gohmert in a House hearing about the DOJ's lack of response to requests by Congress to provide documents related to terrorism funding.
Mr. Gohmert suggests that Mr. Holder's lack of response shows his contempt for Congress' oversight authority. To which, Mr. Holder replies in a threatening tone, "Oh, you don't want to go there, Buddy. You don't want to go there."
That's a schoolyard bully's threat. That's a street thug's threat.
That's a very real threat, too, given the amount of data that has been collected by the executive branch of this government in the past 13 years, given the existence of secret courts, given the practice of indefinite detention. This administration could put together a story just plausible enough for the MSNBC crowd to swallow and destroy virtually any person they wanted to.
I don't recognize my country...
30 years ago - hell, 5 years ago - any political appointee like the attorney general who pulled a stunt like that would have been forced to resign. The media would be playing that sound bite over and over; parsing it; analyzing it; reading meaning into it that may or may not have been there. Americans would have been whipped into a frenzy over the threat of thuggery made by the most powerful law enforcement agent in the country.
Today? A collective yawn...
Mr. Gohmert suggests that Mr. Holder's lack of response shows his contempt for Congress' oversight authority. To which, Mr. Holder replies in a threatening tone, "Oh, you don't want to go there, Buddy. You don't want to go there."
That's a schoolyard bully's threat. That's a street thug's threat.
That's a very real threat, too, given the amount of data that has been collected by the executive branch of this government in the past 13 years, given the existence of secret courts, given the practice of indefinite detention. This administration could put together a story just plausible enough for the MSNBC crowd to swallow and destroy virtually any person they wanted to.
I don't recognize my country...
30 years ago - hell, 5 years ago - any political appointee like the attorney general who pulled a stunt like that would have been forced to resign. The media would be playing that sound bite over and over; parsing it; analyzing it; reading meaning into it that may or may not have been there. Americans would have been whipped into a frenzy over the threat of thuggery made by the most powerful law enforcement agent in the country.
Today? A collective yawn...
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment