Fucking a Popsicle, you just shrivel up

Some buddies and I have been arguing about Franklin Foer's 2005 article in TNR, Swimming With the Sharks, about how Republicans develop their ratfucking and election-stealing tricks when running for national office for the College Republicans. It's a fascinating story, and frightening, if you believe that democracy and the rule of law are the ways to run a nation. The College Republicans don't have much use for democracy and rule of law.

We've had quite a debate about this article via email, with one Republican virtually covering his ears and saying, "Shutupshutupshutup!" to our superior liberal firepower. I hope he strives to understand what's so dangerous about the Republican ruling junta. Here's what I would tell him if he would remove his hands from his eyes and ears and listen for a few minutes:

There's a difference between taking bribes and subverting democracy.

Most college students spend their spring breaks getting laid (Democrats), trying to get laid (Republicans) or working full-time instead of the usual part-time (working-class kids like me). The point of Foer's article is that members of the College Republican National Committee fashion their spring breaks as laboratories to develop their skills for ratfucking, dirty tricks, slander and vote-stealing. Later, in elections out in the real world, you end up with Republican candidates who benefit from ratfucking, dirty tricks, slander and vote-stealing. The corruption of the College Republicans' electoral process is a feature, not a bug. It's practice for local, state and national elections.

The College Democrats just don't operate that way. That's why there hasn't been a Democratic counterpart to the likes of Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

Atwater died (thank god) of a painful brain cancer, but not before he repented for the evil he had done. Karl Rove is destined to expire of a coronary while having his rectum reamed by a pre-op tranny with a Marine flat-top, so any last confession will be mumbled into a saliva-drenched pillow and lost to posterity.

The national convention of the College Republican National Committee is a virtually all-male affair where the big prize goes to the guy who does the best job of dreaming up creative ways to fuck the other guys. Politically, I mean. Just as with the 9/11 hijackers who spent their last night in one another's cozy company in a hotel room with a cloth draped over a painting of a scantily clad woman, the Republicans' guiding motivation stems from repressed homoeroticism and general sexual frustration. Hence the marriages to Popsicles such as Pat, Nancy and Laura, or to hormonally imbalanced, bug-eyed bitches like Barbara. Dick, Ronnie, George and George should have got out more when they were younger, married someone who moves her hips a little when she fucks.

If there's good and bad in both parties, why have Democrats been the targets of more than 80 percent of the federal prosecutions for political corruption under the Bush administration, when under previous administrations, it was about 50 percent? Why was Carol Lam dusted the week after she targeted Dusty Foggo? Why was David Iglesias pushed out when he declined to indict Democrats before the 2006 election because he lacked evidence? Why was Rove acolyte Bud Cummins appointed in Little Rock? Why was there so much foot-dragging in the New Hampshire phone-jamming case, and was the prosecution's bungling an accident?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, find another channel besides Fox News.

Look, there's nothing wrong with being conservative, just as there's nothing wrong with having any other mental handicap. But if you're a conservative and you're truly a patriot, you'll do something to take your party back from scoundrels such as Rove. At the next election, knock on doors. Hand out flyers. Make phone calls. Hold signs at rallies. And demand that your fellow volunteers -- and everyone in the candidate's organization, all the way to the top political advisers -- conduct themselves in exemplary fashion, as benefits a democracy.

Time line of the U.S. attorneys firing scandal

The Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys isn't easy to understand. The elevator-pitch version goes like this: Using the Global War on Terror™ as an excuse, the administration pushed through a change in the law that allows the president to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. The White House recited an endless litany of baseless complaints of Democratic vote fraud during the 2004 and 2006 election cycles. Under cover of these complaints, Bush's closest lieutenants pushed out eight U.S. attorneys -- most of them for not indicting Democrats on trumped-up vote fraud charges, or for at least not leaking information about investigations of Democrats in time to tamper with elections. One of Bush's lieutenants was Harriet Miers, who he briefly nominated to be a justice on the Supreme Court.

Shorter elevator pitch: George Bush politicized the Justice Department to persecute Democrats.

This time line will be a continuing project. It is incomplete and needs items such as the date of Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

February 2005: Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, suggests to D. Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, that all 93 U.S. attorneys be dismissed and replaced.

February 2005: Alberto Gonzales approves the idea of firing "a smaller group of U.S. attorneys."

March 2005: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, emails Harriet Miers, the White House chief counsel, that ranks all 93 U.S. attorneys. According to the Washington Post: "Strong performers 'exhibited loyalty' to the administration; low performers were 'weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.' A third group merited no opinion. At least a dozen prosecutors were on a 'target list' to be fired at one time or another, the e-mails show."

Oct. 3, 2005: Bush nominates Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor.

Oct. 27, 2005: Bush withdraws the Miers nomination, based mostly on opposition from conservatives and Senate requests for documents relating to Miers's work for the White House. Bush later nominates Samuel Alito to replace O'Connor.

January 2006: D. Kyle Sampson writes to Harriet Miers: "I recommend that the Department of Justice and the Office of the Counsel to the President work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys. … [a] limited number of U.S. attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement, mitigating the shock to the system that would result from an across the board firing."

January 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, sends the White House a list of seven candidates for dismissal. Four of them are gone by year's end: Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Bud Cummins of Little Rock; Carol Lam of San Diego, and Kevin Ryan in San Francisco.

March 2006: The USA Patriot Act is renewed. It allows the attorney general to name interim replacements for U.S. attorneys, without Senate confirmation.

Sept. 17, 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales, sends the White House a list of nine U.S. attorneys to be fired. He says one, Bud Cummins in Little Rock, is "in the process of being pushed out." Cummins and four others on the list are fired by year's end. He adds that the administration should eschew Senate confirmation of the replacements because "we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House."

October 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales, adds David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, to the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired, based on complaints from Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) that Iglesias wasn't prosecuting enough vote fraud cases.

October 2006: In a conversation with Alberto Gonzales, Bush mentions complaints about vote fraud investigations.

Dec. 7, 2006: Seven U.S. attorneys are fired. William Kelley, deputy to White House counsel Harriet Miers, writes that Domenici's chief of staff "is happy as a clam" about the firing of Iglesias.

Dec. 14, 2006: Sampson writes in an email that "Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias's body to cool)."

January 2007: Harriet Miers resigns as White House counsel.

March 12, 2007: Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, resigns "after acknowledging that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress."