The Color of Politics

A few days ago Emil Guillermo wrote this fascinating piece on Race Politics In Red And Blue

Here's one thing that's come out of the presidential election: we're all people of color -- every last one of us!

That's President Bush's new color scheme for you.

You're either red, or you're blue. That's all that counts.

Black, brown, yellow? That's so old school.

In the Bush administration, it hardly matters anymore.

Instead, Bush has polarized the country in a way so strictly based on cultural values and ideology that traditional race, and even some class lines, no longer function the same way they did before.

Judging from the split reaction to the nomination of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to replace Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush may have stumbled his way onto a new color paradigm. Through a red-and-blue lens, race politics plays out so differently. We may find Bush playing it a lot more, and Democrats playing it a lot less.

(Bush announced Gonzales as his choice so quickly he didn't even leave much time for any of us to derive some joy from the announced departure of Ashcroft, the father of the USA Patriot Act and the scourge of freedom fighters in America.)

From Bush's perspective, Gonzales was a wise choice. He's been doing Bush's dirty work since their Texas days, when, together, Bush and his judge kept that state in the death-penalty business. So, who better to call on than Gonzales to lock up folks like Jose Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber, who for the last three years has been sequestered without an attorney or due process? Who better to continue racial profiling in the name of antiterrorism?

Gonzales is red to the bone.

(snip)

One man I know who met Gonzales at a national Latino attorneys' meeting in 2001 told me how he recalls being disappointed by Gonzales, especially when he discussed the death penalty and clemency issues with him. "He sounded like he relished the power," the attorney said. "It wasn't a feeling of being humbled by the daunting task of having power of a person's life or death. It was very off-putting."

I'd say that sounds very much like Bush's attitude towards life or death.

It's the same kind of arrogance the civil liberties groups found in the memos Gonzales wrote in 2002, used to justify the U.S. policy of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists.

According to the Center for American Progress, Gonzales opined that laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." The memo also said that an interrogation tactic constituted torture only if it resulted in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions."

Gonzales could have been the attorney for the Marquis de Sade.

Or the general counsel for Saddam Hussein, for that matter.

Even if you are tired of red vs. blue stories, this one stands out and is worthy of examination...