Set your TiVo if you can’t tear yourself away from those magical Oscar red carpet moments, but 60 Minutes is running a long awaited piece on the damage that Bushco’s Justice Department has done to our political process. It’s harrowing. Alberto’s gang, with the active participation of Karl Rove, railroaded Alabama’s Democratic Governor Don Siegelman into jail on the thinnest evidence of corruption. I won’t go into the details here, as the case is complicated, but the bottom line has much less to do with Siegelman than is does with the outright theft of our rule of law. From Kagro X at Kos:

“That’s the true measure of the damage the Bush-Cheney “administration” has caused. It’s no longer just your basic looting of the Treasury. Dollar-based corruption we at least understand. But corruption of the actual mechanisms of the government itself? Corruption not meant to enrich, but to corrode public trust in the only system we have for actually holding corrupt officials to account?

“We’re now looking at federal law enforcement so grossly politicized that even a landslide victory for the opposition party might not be able to root the corruption out.

“George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have injected the American government with a slow-acting poison it will take decades to overcome. And we haven’t yet, in this post, considered how their “administration” has taken such pains to pave the path to prison for political opponents with tools previously so incompatible with the American system of justice as to have been unimaginable: completely unchecked (and indeed, uncheckable) domestic spying; indefinite detention; the suspension of habeas corpus; the official sanction of torture (and its mumbo-jumbo defense by a Supreme Court Justice); extraordinary rendition… the list goes on and on.”

“And one might well ask if it ever can be overcome.”

Kagro X concludes: “Make yourselves aware. And demand of your candidates that they face up to this story’s implications.”

Exactly.