The great unraveling of the Bush Administration’s politically abusive prosecution of Governor Siegelman has just started. The Department of Justice is still busy coming up with new variations on “the dog ate my homework” in response to the House Judiciary Committee’s demand for documents. There is a lot to come out in the next weeks. When the dust has settled, we’re going to see that the prosecutors’ claims that the entire process was run beginning to end by nonpolitical, career attorneys are complete lies. Instead, we will learn that the process was dictated by politicos from the beginning to the end. We will learn that there are very good reasons to question the impartiality of the judge handling the case (stay tuned here as they unfold over the next two weeks). And we’ll get more details on the role that Bill Pryor, Bill Canary and, yes, Karl Rove played in the entire tale. So we’re just at the beginning right now.
But even at the beginning, with the Gonzales Justice Department, the Alabama GOP and their allied media in spin-overdrive shoveling out disinformation, the people of Alabama are slowly coming to understand the abuse that has been done.
In fact, in an informal poll put out in today’s Birmingham Business Journal, a slender majority of Alabamians – 50% – express the view that Governor Siegelman was the victim of a politically selective prosecution.
When the whole story’s out in all its lurid detail, I expect we’ll see that number reach 70% or 80%. There will always be the residual 20%-30% who take their news from the B’ham News and who believe the earth is flat.
Bill Canary and his wife Leura, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and the political connivers who pushed the persecution of Donald Siegelman “misunderestimated” something important: Alabamians still have a sense of justice. And they know political thuggery when they see it.
