Huckleberry Howler

by digby


How can the paper of record write a lengthy puff piece about the brave, maverick integrity of Senator Huckleberry Graham and make no metion of the fact that he and his pal Jon Kyl inserted a fraudulent 12,000 word colloquey into the congressional record to fool the US Supreme Court and were caught red-handed. The Supreme Court merely noted this in the footnotes of the Hamdan decision, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued an unusual order rejecting their amicus brief alone, although they accepted five others. As John Dean wrote: "No one familiar with this remarkable behavior by Graham and Kyl can doubt why the court did not want to hear from these senators."

This was not a small thing. Huckleberry and Kyl wrote an entire script of a debate that never happened in order to create a false legislative history that they then cited in an amicus brief for the government in the Hamdan case. They defrauded the court and they did it with the express purpose of bolstering the government's argument that the Senate had intended that the Supreme Court be stripped of jurisdiction in the Hamdan case.

This is remarkable not only because it features two Senators outright lying to the Supreme Court. It is also remarkable because the decision in that case is the one the NY Times says Huckleberry is now bravely defending against the wishes of his own party. I would have thought the reporter might have asked old Huck about where he actually stands on this issue.

This is the thing about Graham and why he is one of the most untrustworthy members of the Republican party. He is the guy who is out there portraying himself as the voice of reason, the man who thoughtfully entertains the whole range of opinion and settles on the reasonable middle ground. The truth is that he pretends to do all that while he ruthlessly advances the Republican agenda --- even to the point where he would outright defraud the US Supreme Court while claiming to be a strict adherent to the rule of law.

The media love those they deem "mavericks" because they believe this silly trope that if both sides are mad at you, you must be right. The problem is that they fail to see that the modern Republicans --- the most disciplined political party in American history --- never seem to get really angry at Huckleberry. You'd think they'd wonder why. The reason is that he's a slick political operator who manages to advance the Republican agenda while convincing the gullible press he's bucking it.

He is going to go far in the post Bush universe. The market for "men of integrity" on the GOP side is going to be huge. Graham and his soul mate John McCain, every reporter's dream duo, are going to be the beneficiaries of the rebranding of the "real conservative." And the NY Times will be there to cheer them on --- ignoring all the evidence of their opportunism and political calculation to advance the new narrative of the brave Republicans who saved America. Again.



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