Some are calling this an admission…

Attorney challenges Monegan firing inquiry

The state has hired a private lawyer to represent Gov. Sarah Palin’s office in the Legislature’s investigation into the firing of former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The lawyer already has challenged whether lawmakers even have authority to oversee the inquiry.

The attorney hired to represent Palin, Thomas Van Flein, is challenging the authority of state Sen. Hollis French, a Democrat and former state prosecutor, who is project director for the legislative investigation.  Here’s his take on the matter…

"Our concern is that Hollis French turns into Ken Starr and uses public money to pursue a political vendetta rather than truly pursue an honest inquiry into an alleged ethics issue," Van Flein said in an interview.

Oh really?   While the sight of a republican spokesdroid for Sarah Palin saying publicly what everyone who was paying back then already knows about the Ken Starr investigations, it’s a mistake to take that as an admission. 

This is not your father’s republican party.  It’s the party of president junior, the most miserable failure of a man you ever met who can see himself as a glorious president and war leader.  It’s the party of James Dobson Gary Bauer and other religious right leaders who can thunder about sexual morality and family values and come rushing to the defence of Palin’s pregnant and unmarried teenage daughter.  It’s the party of CEOs that champion free markets and capitalism one moment and then bribe congress into locking down markets, stifling emergent technologies and handing out fat no-bid government contracts.  Republican doublethink would make Orwell’s jaw drop, let alone Goldwater’s. 

They knew Starr was engaging in a political vendetta.  They have always known that.  But Starr was conducting an honest inquiry into an alleged ethics issue.  They have always known that too.  They have always known both those things.  If you think that’s a contradiction, you’re still living in the reality based community, for which they no longer have any use…

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

-Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush

That wasn’t just the heart of the Bush Presidency, it was a glimpse into the heart and soul of the movement conservatives who now dominate the republican party, both secular and Christianist.  Reality is whatever they wish it to be, at the moment they need it to be that.  When they need it to be something else, then it becomes that thing too.  Never mind facts, never mind science, never mind God Almighty Himself.  They create reality.  And when it comes crashing down on their thick heads, they’ll keep right on creating new realities that deny everything they hate because they cannot cope with it, just like every other tinpot tyrant who ever spent his list furtive moments alone in a bunker somewhere, while the world burned all around him.

This is why we need to pry their hands off the levers of power come November.  It’s not the economy.  It’s not the Supreme Court.  It’s not the war.  It’s the reality stupid.  The ship of state needs pilots who don’t simply wish away the iceburgs.