Tony Snow can rot in hell, alongside the other members of the Bush cabal. No more sympathy for the devil.

Comey had a message.

When Card and Gonzales came a callin’ on Ascroft..

bringing sweetness and mercy

to his ICU bed.

Attorney General Ashcroft was clinically delirious.

[Temporarily out o' his gourd.]

Georgie’s frantic for a “Get out of jail free” law for his domestic espionage.

That’s why “FISA reform” keeps oozing out of the Rethug’s agenda.

Abu Gonzales and Card waited to ask Ashcroft’s OK…

and had formally delegated his official powers .

Diagnostic criteria for 293.0 Delirium Due to.. Medical Condition]

A. Disturbance of consciousness (i.e., reduced clarity of awareness of the environment) with reduced ability to focus, sustain, or shift attention.

B. A change in cognition (such as memory deficit, disorientation, language disturbance) or the development of a perceptual disturbance that is not better accounted for by a preexisting, established, or evolving dementia.

C. The disturbance develops over a short period of time (usually hours to days) and tends to fluctuate during the course of the day.

D. There is evidence from the history, physical examination, or laboratory findings that the disturbance is caused by the direct physiological consequences of a general medical condition.

Ashcroft had been in intensive care at George Washington University hospital for “over a week” before Gonzales and Card paid him a visit. Mrs. Ashcroft had banned “all visitors and all phone calls.” Comey described Ashcroft’s condition on the day of Card and Gonzales’s visit:

Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off.

Ashcroft’s chief of staff also personally requested that Comey “not resign until Mr. Ashcroft was well enough to resign with me. He was very concerned that Mr. Ashcroft was not well enough to understand fully what was going on.”

[h/t TP]

orientation

Awareness of one’s location in the continuum of time and space and of the identity of one’s self and familiar others.

Also: disorientation, oriented, oriented x 3, oriented time three, oriented in all spheres, oriented to time, place, and person

That’s a good one. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Ashcroft had gall bladder surgery for a life threatening gallstone pancreatitis, not an appendectomy.

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2004/March/04_opa_159.htm

Ashcroft had obstructive pancreatitis, caused by gallstones blocking his pancreatic duct – one of THE most painful conditions one can experience short of Abu Ghraib/Gitmo torture, in which pancreatic juices back up and literally eat away at the heavily innervated pancreas.

Ashcroft would have been writhing in pain on admission, and heavily doped up continuously from the time he was admitted on Mar 4 2004 through his surgery on Mar 9, and during his recovery in the ICU on Mar 10 when Gonzo and Card were sent in to try to finagle Ashcroft into signing off on the FISA-violating warrantless wiretap scheme.

Anesthesia, by definition, makes your brain not work. We are all grateful that we can be operated on and have our brain blissfully unaware.

It’s not the operation that affects your thinking, it is the anesthesia. I believe Mr. Comey described Mr. Ashcroft’s condition very explicitly. Please read it if you haven’t.

I think Tony Snow is guilty of the attitude that is said to define “major surgery” and “minor surgery”. If Tony Snow is operated on, it is major surgery. If it is anyone else, it is minor surgery.

Some people do not become more sympathetic to the plight of others when they go through troubles with their health. Instead of offering sympathy like most of us did when we learned that Tony’s cancer had returned, he callously behaved like no one else has really been sick except himself.

PS – I like what one poster on DKos said today about Falwell: I hope he died without pain, entered the Pearly Gates, basked in the glow of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – and then was introduced to Jesus’ boy friend.

…Joe Lievermin…

…is throwing a fundraising bash for…

…REPULSIVESCUM Susan Collins…

…email Harry and Nancy and DEMAND…

…his chairmanship be YANKED!

Too much Satanist mind control!

Bottomboy has inadvertently described one of the challenges to the liberal progressive community – we are fighting against amoral sociopaths who, by definition, see no need to play fairly. We can’t lower ourselves to their level. In fact, most of us are incapable of lowering ourselves to that level. We just need to keep doing the right thing.

senator patrick leahy to
subpoena bradley schlozman
on thursday, may 17, 2007!

when we put senator leahy’s statements
of this morning, together with thursday’s
senate judiciary committee executive
business meeting agenda. . . one may
easily surmise that by thursday, sen.
leahy plans to have a subpoena with mr.
schlozman’s name on it, ready for service.

i bet there will be action on
gonzales’ failure to comply with
rove e-mail subpoena return-date
of this afternoon, as well. . .