The Mukasey Consensus? No, He's a Motherfucker, Too:
If you're a motherfucker, what you do is fuck mothers. When you're presented with a choice to fuck a mother or go down on a sister, you will always do some motherfucking. It's because you're a motherfucker. No one's gonna deter you from fucking mothers constantly. You'll fuck a mother anywhere: in her bedroom, at the movies, in church, in an alley behind your grandmother's apartment (for you are not a grandmotherfucker. Although you could be tempted...). It's because you're a motherfucker. It's all anyone expects you to be. Sure, sure, people can tell you perhaps it's time to stop fucking mothers, to try fucking someone else for a while. But that's not who you are. It's not like all of a sudden you're gonna stop fucking mothers. Maybe, once everyone realizes how much you fuck mothers, you need to do some kind of secret fucking of mothers. Instead of just announcing to the world that you're gonna fuck this mother, you just do it on the down-low so everyone thinks you've stopped fucking mothers. That way, if no one asks and if no one checks things out, you can safely fuck a mother.

When George W. Bush announced the nomination of former judge Michael B. Mukasey (whose name is uncomfortably close to "mucusy") to be Attorney General, you heard a sigh of relief that finally Bush wasn't gonna go the usual route of choosing a motherfucker, like Theodore Olson, and was instead going to build consensus. Look, some on the left said, he ain't bad: in the Jose Padilla case, he said that the poor bastard could meet with his lawyer (even if he also decided that Bush could hold a citizen arrested in the United States as an enemy combatant). In other words, hey, it could be worse. In other words, we could have been shivved in the jugular; instead, we'll get cut in the gut so we bleed slower.

So what's the game with Mukasey, the seemingly innocuous respected judge who is beloved by Charles Schumer and deemed acceptable for at least consideration to be AG by Democrats? Someone who is gratifyingly driving conservatives nutzoid? There's a lot of traps to fall into here, that Bush understands he's a lame duck, that he's decided to work with Democrats. But that's not the way these fuckers work. If you start believing that, you will end up hog-tied with a golf club in your ass facing the business end of a .38. And your mother will be fucked.

Ultimately, the Bush administration, especially Dick Cheney and his minions, doesn't give a bloody monkey shit about social issues or the goals of the religious right. Nominating John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court was not about that - it just so happens that they were also social issue savages. All the White House cares about is the expansion of executive power. Bottom fuckin' line. And on that count, despite letting Padilla talk to a lawyer to challenge his enemy combatant status (and that's it), Mukasey fucks mothers with the best of 'em.

In a December 2, 1985 op-ed for the New York Times, cited in a Washington Post article today, Mukasey argued for an expansion of legal powers and tactics of then U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani in the crusade against organized crime. In language that could be lifted out of one of Bush's speeches on al-Qaeda today, Mukasey wrote of the Mafia, "It is not the creation of novelists or journalists. It has exacted a toll in misery that would shame the Inquisition and a toll in treasure that would embarrass the Pentagon." He supported Giuliani's intimidation of defense attorneys by issuing subpoenas to them (thus allowing their offices to be searched and compelling them to testify against their own clients).

And, in a statement that would warm the cold, dead heart of John Yoo, Mukasey wrote, "The presumption of innocence is a rule of evidence - a basic one, to be sure, but a rule of evidence nonetheless, which applies during a trial, not beforehand." In other words, according to Mukasey, only when you walk into the courtroom for your trial are you presumed to be innocent. Otherwise, all of us walking around free today are more or less presumptively criminals. Let the searches without warrants begin.

And he was Roy Cohn's lawyer at the end of that evil bastard's life. If one defended the mother of all motherfuckers, well, one fucks mothers even by proximity.

(But the unknown here is what's up with the Giuliani connection being forged by the Bush administration? Mukasey is bestest buddies with Giuliani. The Rude Pundit needs to ponder this part.)