Despite my last post being about Gonzales, I want to stress that it had nothing to do with why the Senate vote was happening. My frustration wasn’t that the Senate wasn’t going to be able to show ol’ Berty that we don’t think he’s competent, it was the principle of the thing. I don’t really care about the attorney firing scandal, so that issue had no bearing on the situation to me. Let me repeat that.

I don’t care about the attorney firing scandal.

There, I said it. The attorney firing scandal is boring to me. It’s dealing with such a generally inane event that I just can’t rouse myself to get worked up over it and act like I’m furious at yet another example of Bush Clan corruption. I suppose there are a lot of people who are just happy that this time around there’s something that will take down Gonzales and start up the wave against the White House, but I just don’t see it that way. A quick history lesson on this site.

I’ve said recently that my motivation just isn’t what it used to be. I felt lazy for a while, but then I realized that part of it was that the news items just plain didn’t catch my attention. You see, this site started in December of 2005. At the time, the NSA wiretapping scandal had just come out. It was revealed that the president was authorizing an agency to illegally spy on millions of American citizens in blatant breach of the FISA statute. The revelation was shocking, and infuriated me enough to start this site and spend my own money on its upkeep.

Next came Abramoff. Not a huge scandal, but a big one for the GOP in general. So many within Congress taking money from the Indian scammer. Meh.

Abu Ghraib and the Gitmo accusations now. Torture being liberally used on suspects in our prisons. Worse still, it turned out that many of them were innocent. In fact, most. Our government, via our military, brutalizing innocents and keeping them from having even the most basic rights. Over time we found out that there were multiple secret prisons littered about, worse by far than even Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The CIA scandal. The outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover agent was reaching up into the White House, possibly directly from Dick Cheney or Karl Rove.

Bush ordered a CIA group specifically formed to hunt down Osama Bin Laden to be disbanded.

In late 2002, Bush ordered troops and officials in Afghanistan to leave, even though they had Bin Laden on the ropes, in order to get into Iraq a full 8 months before the war resolution was even on the table.

At every turn, it seemed as though there was another disaster going on in the bowels of the Bush Administration. And these weren’t little “LewinskiGate” type scandals, these involved torture, spying, deception, and putting our nation in greater danger. Each story was of great national import, each one was evidence that this president and those around him were unmitigated horror shows and stood to not only wreck the nation but inflame anti-American sentiment, the cause of terrorism no less, worldwide.

Now, it’s the attorney firing scandal. Alberto Gonzales may have ordered that a few attorneys be dismissed and replaced based almost solely on political leanings. Thanks to the PATRIOT Act, the AG (did he get the job just because his initials match?) can appoint “interim” attorneys for as long as they want to be there, effectively removing their status as “interim”. From there the issue spiders, involving DoJ attempts to get attorneys to indict Democrats shortly before elections and such. Then there’s the severely contradictory statements made by the various people involved.

Important? Sure. But this is far from the earth-shattering revelations of the others. Tell someone that the president got a few attorneys fired over political interests and they might get briefly interested. Tell them that innocent people are being tortured or that their phone lines are being illegally tapped and now you have their attention.

I’m glad that Alberto Gonzales may get his just due, but this is not headline day by day news. The fact that the other issues have not been resolved, and yet they are not at the forefront of our discourse is discouraging. Just because it’s “old” means nothing. The innocent Iraqis tortured in CIA prisons don’t get to move onto the next thing when people stop being interested. Those taps on your phone and internet line don’t disconnect after the story gets boring.

This isn’t going to rally the forces against Bush, and the issue isn’t major enough to actually cause a problem. Meanwhile, far more important stories are getting lost. So you know, I don’t really care about the attorney firing scandal.

If you want to know why it is that our country isn’t exactly headed in the right direction, here it is right here. The Senate GOP didn’t vote down the “no confidence” bid concerning Alberto Gonzales, they blocked voting on it entirely. This paragraph is all you need:

The debate and vote were purely symbolic, and Democrats acknowledged before bringing up the resolution they did not have the votes needed to invoke cloture and bring the resolution itself to the floor.

That’s right. Senators refused to allow a purely symbolic vote to take place. I can’t even muster a properly snarky comment this is so stupid.