Greenwald on Gonzales hearing

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UPDATE: A more positive take on these hearing can be found on Kos here ("I have never seen a more thorough ass chewing of a government official in a hearing before.").

Overall, a pretty depressing portrait of government in( )action:
This is what I have learned so far: All of the Senators are very "concerned" and sometimes even "disturbed" about many things, almost all of them different for each Senator. Gonzales definitely shares their concerns about everything, and assures them he takes it very seriously and he is happy to sit down with them and explore ways to fix/improve/think about it.
He also learned that Orrin Hatch is really concerned about--can you guess? Terrorism? Iraq? Budget deficits? North Korean Nukes? New Orleans? Darfur? Abortion? Torture? Nope. He's concerned about porn:
Hatch then spent the rest of his time (all 6 minutes) demanding that Gonzales and the Justice Department devote much more of its resources and attention -- including FBI agents, other law-enforcement resources and a new task force -- to enforcing anti-obscenity laws against people in the U.S. who produce pornography, particularly those who sell it over the Internet, and urged that whole new laws be created to criminalize Internet pornography.

[...]

So in the middle of the Epic, Overarching, Greatest and Most Important War of Civilizations of this Time and Any Other Time, Alberto Gonzales and Orrin Hatch spent their time at a Congressional hearing designed to exercise Justice Department oversight talking solmenly about Girls Gone Wild.
Feingold makes some good points, though:
Feingold: Oh, well it's nice that you didn't have us "in your mind" when making those accusations, but given that you and the President were running around the country accusing people of opposing eavesdropping on terrorists in the middle of an election, the fact that you didn't have Congressional Democrats in "mind" isn't significant. Your intent was to make people think that anyone who opposed the "TSP" did not want to eavesdrop on terrorists, even though that was false. No Democrats oppose eavesdropping on terrorists.

Gonzales: I wasn't referring to Democrats.
Yeah, right.

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