And for the record, the two Senators who were more than comfortable being on the wrong side of history (and being labeled as racists by me, personally) were: John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
To my Father, who is planning on moving to Texas (voluntarily), all I can say is way to go. Your Senator at work!
Then one local paper stepped up with this tasty nugget of news:
President Obama's choice to run the Justice Department has assured senior Republican senators that he won't prosecute intelligence officers or political appointees who were involved in the Bush administration's policy of "enhanced interrogations."
Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, Missouri Republican and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.'s nomination for attorney general because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama's Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.
Kit Bond...one of the original, and greatest of the Reagan Airheads.
All of the sudden, everyone is running with that quote: TPM, Huffington Post (well, HuffPo did cover the story at some point, and fortunately changed it)…
…finally, Holder's aides called bull!@$%.
"Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted," the aide said via e-mail. "He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions."
Even Judicary Chairman Pat Leahy of Vertmont cracked back on the supposition that the Nation's Top Cop would fail to prosecute crimes where he saw them.
"It would be completely wrong if a senator said, 'I'll vote for you if you promise to withhold prosecution of a crime'," Leahy told me. "No senator would make a request like that. It'd be improper."
In fact, in a written response to a question by Torture defender John Kyl of Arizona, Holder said:
Prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law. But where it is clear that a government agent has acted in "reasonable and good-faith reliance on Justice Department legal opinions" authoritatively permitting his conduct, I would find it difficult to justify commencing a full-blown criminal investigation, let alone a prosecution.
Not comforting, but acceptable...provided no one gets in the way of Congress investigating this mess.
So where did this story come from?
Well, all one has to do is look at the original source of the Kit Bond quote.
The Washington Times, the Fox News of Newspapers.
There's your problem right there.
