Bush: Senate Judiciary Committee can blow me

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush gave Democrats a choice Tuesday: either accept his offer to have Karl Rove and Harriet Miers lie about the purging of eight federal prosecutors in an informal setting with no one writing anything down, or he would smite them with his magical Unitary Executive powers.

Democrats' response was swift and firm: they said he could go fuck himself.

"Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That's the formula for true accountability," said Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I mean, is he serious?"

Bush, in a belligerent cocktail-hour statement at the White House, said he would fight any subpoena effort in court, and strangle with his own hands any senator who dared to question his authority.

"We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants," he said, enunciating with the elaborate care of the consistently smashed. "It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available. That will be a damn shame, and the consequences will be consequential."

He added that he owns this fucking country and the goddamn federal prosecutors are his employees and it is only natural and just that he should replace them if they start investigating his crooked friends or failing to harass his political enemies. While pretending to disapprove of the way the decisions were explained to Congress, he insisted "there is no indication that anybody did anything improper."

Bush said he told White House counsel Fred Fielding to tell Congress they could interview Karl Rove and Harriet Miers and their little helpers--but only on the president's suspiciously Soviet terms: in private, "without the need for an oath" and without a transcript. Preferably in the dark.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented in its magnanimity and a perfectly reasonable way for Congress to act like they're the ones running his country.

"If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed and take the information my people give them and shut the fuck up," Bush said. "If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see, and no one will blame me for having all those fuckers shot."

The House Judiciary Committee is expected to authorize subpoenas for Rove, Miers and their deputies on Wednesday; the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to follow suit a day later.

Bush said he worries that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution for future Bushes.

"My choice is to make sure that I safeguard the ability for deciders to get good decisions," he said, drunkenly stabbing the air with his index finger. "If the staff of a president operated in constant fear of being held accountable for the things they tell the president it's legal for him to do, the American people would be ill-served."

The Senate, meanwhile, voted to strip Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of the authority he gave himself under the Patriot Act to fill U.S. attorney vacancies without Senate confirmation. The Justice Department and White House recently purged eight perfectly competent federal prosecutors, some because they were investigating Republicans and others because they weren't investigating Democrats.

Several Democrats, including presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Edwards, have called for Gonzales' ouster or resignation. So have a handful of Republican lawmakers. So have 80% of Americans polled, which is to say just about everyone who's ever heard of him.