Dems, Don't Dread Fred

I predicted (re: guessed) that Bushco was showing the door to Harriet Miers because they wanted someone more combative in the role of White House legal counsel.

Enter Fred Fielding, as established of a partisan Washington Repug mouthpiece as they come (and speaking of dogs, Bushco tossed a bone to Mike Allen, its stenographic poodle, and gave him the exclusive here).

I located an interview that The Washington Lawyer magazine conducted with Friendly in an attempt to figure out what he’ll do on behalf of Bushco besides “stonewall” and argue, and I thought this excerpt was interesting:

TWL: After you left the Reagan White House, and the Iran-contra matter broke, were you surprised at how quickly the word impeachment started to be bandied about?

FFF: It became evident to me that there was a very serious political element at work. I know that the term impeachment was bandied about. I do not believe, however, that the word was used with the ferocity it was more recently or that it was in the Nixon years.

There has been a whole sea change in politics in the last 30 or 40 years. There has been a breakdown in comity. It makes relationships especially difficult if you have opposite parties on each end of Pennsylvania Avenue. We have three branches of government, but powers are shared rather than exclusive. Given this reality, governance requires comity.

Refdesk.com defines comity as “an atmosphere of social harmony.” Let’s see how much of that transpires over the next few months as the Dems try to hold Dubya accountable for a change, Fielding fires back and our corporate media “tut tuts” in indignation over those impertinent Democrats who refuse to let Dubya do whatever he wants (see, with Hillary Clinton running for president, the REAL story to them will be their Broderesque intrusions into the state of the Clintons’ marriage, as well as whether or not Barack Hussein Obama sniffed cocaine after all or how much money John Edwards made as a trial lawyer).

Also, I realize this doesn’t have anything to do with Fred Fielding’s legal ability, but I simply had to share this quote with you.

TWL: People have described (President Reagan, referring to Iran-Contra again) as being almost obsessed with the hostages in Lebanon. Did you get that sense?

FFF: He was incensed and outraged when the CIA station chief in Lebanon was murdered, and his heart was broken when the bombing at the Marine barracks in Beirut killed 260 Marines. He understood, however, that these things happen.

“These things happen,” huh? Yep, they do…when you don’t fortify your barricades properly and build the marine compound in the middle of an air strip (and I thought Atrios made a good point about the bombing versus other catastrophes involving our troops here).

Even though this is a freeper site (Censure Murtha? Please…), I’m going to link to it so, in the highly unlikely event that Fielding actually reads this post, he can learn more about the 241 service people who died that day because “these things happen.”

After reading that sentence with the Iraq horror fresh in my mind as well as many other people’s, I have to wonder why on earth anyone with a family member or friend in the military would ever vote for the Republican Party again.