"...to address terrorism and other threats to our nation..."
Bush:
"...your mission to extend equal justice for all Americans goes far beyond the war on terror...
...a model of courage..."
Gonzales:
"...the cries of those powerless souls...
...whose pleas for help echo powerfully within the halls of justice..."
"...to be a champion..."
"...first allegiance must always be to the constitution..."
"...to address terrorism and other threats to our nation..."
The first allegiance of any true champion would be to the things the Constitution was crafted to protect, to the aspirations of the men who wrote it, and not to the document itself. It's this assumption of the sanctity and totality of the rules that makes the complete failure of these erstwhile "champions" so plain.
Preserving the rules is much easier than preserving what the rules were crafted to defend; and most importantly, it protects the transgressions in principle that the necessarily limited rules enable.
Great fortunes and massive powers have been amassed by working around the letter of the law; an allegiance to the law and its letter that ignores and refuses to honor the things the laws were designed to preserve protects instead transgressors whose crimes aren't yet statutory.
Another assumption, one that goes unspoken, is that there are no crimes worth the bother that haven't already been documented and legislated against. As the Kyoto Protocol stumbles into practice and the world turns toward the inhospitable.
The idea that there are crimes, and great crimes - not-yet codified awful acts whose results are nightmare - that we can't articulate, is ridiculed not for its illogical premise, but because it is impractical and destructive of the existing boundaries of power; and because it blasphemes the purportedly God-given commands of religion and the by-extension God-given laws of men who profess to be godly.
Rule-worship will eventually create an insect presence out of what it began within, organic imprecision and fecundity replaced with sterility and pragmatic exactitude. As the hive expands to all available surface swamps become concrete tanks, the stench and decay rising from the muck and fetid chaos that shelter the pristine eggs and new life-forms in the womb of life get replaced with aerosol poisons and the metallic tang of exhaust gases rising above the birth-vats of genetically-tuned slave-organisms.
Rule-worship now creates its mirror-twin, a reverence for the gaps between the regulations. An insistence on adherence to the letter of the law is an insistence on excusing the formally permitted non-illegalities that enrich the clever opportune. Within that architecture shelters the truly evil, protected by the mechanical enforcement of our incomplete codes; enforcement done mostly by the well-intentioned but incompetent semi-champions Gonzales and his masters dupe and manipulate.
The Constitution has carried to this time because it was envisioned as protecting those who hadn't yet become - it wasn't intended to preserve the status quo, though its failings lie in that direction. The best laws, the best rules, preserve the process of becoming by incorporating things that haven't yet happened into their mandate.
The Constitution, like the best inventions of human governance, is more about the future than the present - not about grasping control of the future, but about allowing the best possibilities room to become, to grow into existence. It is the great crime of these men to use the incomplete strengths of our given laws to thwart what those laws were originally inspired to protect, and make possible.
