Nixon was a piker

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush, the most crooked piece of shit ever to hold the office, claimed executive privilege Thursday and rejected demands for White House documents and testimony about the Family's purge of insufficiently partisan U.S. attorneys.

His decision was denounced as "Nixonian stonewalling" by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who admitted privately that he meant to say "the most pernicious bullshit I've ever heard of," but was too angry.

Bush rejected subpoenas for documents from Bush Family cheerleaders Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor. The White House made it clear that neither one would testify next month, and that Congress should shut the fuck up and stop bothering them with this "rule of law" crap.

Presidential counsel Fred Fielding said Bush had made a reasonable attempt at a cover-up but the filthy Democratic-led Congress forced the confrontation by issuing subpoenas. "With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by asserting that the president is above the law."

The assertion of executive privilege was the latest turn in increasingly hostile standoffs between the administration and the Congress over the illegal and disastrous Iraq war, unlimited executive power, the War on Terror™ and Vice President Dick Cheney's bizarre claim that he is a fourth branch of government, untouchable by the laws of man. A day earlier, the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered subpoenas to the offices of Bush, Cheney, the national security adviser and the Justice Department about the administration's unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program.

White House Channel anchorman Tony Snow weighed in with a whining rebuke of Congress. He accused Democrats of trying "to make life difficult for the White House. It also may explain why this is the least popular Congress in decades." He refused to speculate whether putting impeachment back on the table would make them more popular, or less.

Congressional committees sought the documents and testimony in their investigations of crooked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' rape of the Justice Department and the firing of eight or nine or twenty-seven federal attorneys over the winter. Democrats say the firings were part of a scheme to rig elections and stack the courts so none of these bastards will ever go to jail. The White House contends that U.S. attorneys are political appointees who can be hired and fired for almost any reason, including honesty.

In a letter to Leahy and Conyers, Fielding pretended Bush had "attempted to chart a course of cooperation" by releasing more than 8,500 pages of irrelevant documents and sending Gonzales to Capitol Hill to lie to Congress.

The president also had offered to make Miers, Taylor, head ratfucker Karl Rove and their flunkies available to be interviewed by the Judiciary committees in an undisclosed D.C.-area motor lodge, with no writing implements allowed and under no obligation to tell the truth. Leahy and Conyers rejected that proposal, but not before calling back to ask if it was a joke.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's senior Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said the House and Senate panels should accept Bush's original offer, and that President Kennedy was killed by a magic bullet.

Fielding explained Bush's position on executive privilege this way: "For the president to perform his unique constitutional duties, which are unlike the duties of any president in history, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice from the people who explain things to him, free and open discussions, blah blah blah blah blah."

This "bedrock presidential prerogative" exists, in part, to protect the president from being compelled to disclose anything to Congress or anyone else, Fielding argued.

The most famous claim of executive privilege was in 1974, when President Nixon went to the Supreme Court to avoid surrendering his idiotic tape recordings in the Watergate scandal. The court unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes, and now he's dead.