A Tale of Two Lawyers

[UPDATE:  WAR's confirmation FAILED!]

On the one hand, we have Wayne Anthony Ross, affectionately known as WAR.

 

We heard, just today during his confirmation hearing, that he was so generous to the Menard children that he gave them their first guns.  If I was the parent of those children, I would have kicked him out.  But that's just me.

From ADN, we have these words—words that have been recorded by National Public Radio in Alaska.  Yet, WAR is today denying he has ever said them:

It seems to me the most important thing that can be done by the Senate is not argue with legal or illegal but to appoint somebody to represent Juneau.

And he is further quoted from his own letter in support of repealing an ordinance that would
insure that gays and lesbians would be protected from discrimination (bolding is mine).

I am in favor of repeal of the measure. I see nothing involving civil rights in this matter. We all, heterosexual or homosexual, have certain rights. This bill seems to give extra rights to a group whose lifestyle was a crime only a few years ago, and whose beliefs are certainly immoral in the eyes of anyone with some semblance of intelligence and moral character...

It is a shame that you folks don’t have some causes you could become involved in that are of benefit to society in general. Instead, you support degenerates...

[Instead of supporting anti-abortion causes] you collectively contribute $5,000 to the cause of sexual perversion.

If there were any doubt that WAR was 'in the tub' with Governor Palin, there are these exchanges.  Ross, who apparently doesn't "like people taking shots at courageous women," offered, "She's been shot at so much, she doesn't want to reach out."  During a Senate hearing, Representative Ramras asked WAR about Palin's multiple ethics complaints and pointed explicitly to the recent ethics complaint about Palin wearing Arctic Cat gear during official duties:

RAMRAS: She was wearing Arctic Cat gears and leathers--

ROSS: She was provocative. She looked really good didn't she?

RAMRAS: Yes...[beat]...Well no, not to a lot of Alaska she didn't. To a lot of Alaska she looked like a walking billboard.

So, WAR thinks people are beating up on the Governor, and he would like everyone to know he thinks she looked darn sexy in her Arctic Cat gear, ethics be damned.  He's been giving her poor advice, telling her that appointing three Senate replacements at once was legal, and telling her that the Senate Democrats ought to vote in public, and telling her that the whole Senate should really get a chance to vote on a Democratic seat replacement.

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And then, we have Rex Butler.

Rex doesn't go by his initials, he goes by his reputation as a hard-hitting, fair attorney.

From the Anchorage Press, we learn that:

Rex Butler [is] a colorful Anchorage defense attorney who wins the respect of miscreants and cops alike and has a client list that's a who's who of high-profile Alaska crime.

Butler loves this work, he says, because he loves to help the people that the world turns their backs on. He's a smooth, polite, church-going family man. He's also stylish. And unflappable. And dogged.

"He can be a ferocious cross-examiner," says Sergeant Dave Koch of the Anchorage Police Department. "It can be uncomfortable."

Butler can be courtly, too - but not necessarily in court. When his clients' futures are on the line, he goes to war, he says. "This is a fight. It's a battle."

Recently, ADN reported that Rex has taken on not only Sherry Johnston's case but advocacy for Levi Johnston, who only wants to share in parenting the child he recently had with Governor Palin's daughter.

Levi Johnston's lawyer is bristling at suggestions from Gov. Sarah Palin's family that the 19-year-old is a deadbeat dad. "I wish that Sarah Palin's father would get his facts correct, quite frankly," attorney Rex Butler said Wednesday.

Palin's father, Chuck Heath, claims in a story being published Friday in Us Weekly magazine that the unemployed Johnston isn't financially supporting the infant. He said he wishes Johnston would take some money from the interviews and buy diapers for Tripp.

Butler told The Associated Press that Johnston was not paid for the interviews and is tired of the Palin family's characterization of his client.

Heath was "trying to make the young man look like a deadbeat father, and, you know, they may have a rude awakening one day if he tries to get custody," Butler said.

"They don't want to share his child with him like they should," he said.

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So there you have it.  On the one hand, we have someone who defends a nutcase who throws freezing cold water on Iraq "war" protestors and supports his defense by saying that his client was only expressing his own first amendment rights; someone who was overheard saying that men should be able to 'rape' their wives.  And on the other hand, we have someone who is taking up the fight against Palin's bully pulpit from which she is trying to "wooten" Levi Johnston (and possibly Levi's mother).

At this moment, the debate over Ross's confirmation vote still rages.  I only wish I could vote.

Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home!

Get them the hell out of Iraq, and Afghanistan for that matter.

As long as our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters are assigned to places like Forward Operating Base Falcon, as long as their jobs involve driving around Bahgdad or Kirkuk or Fallujah in tanks with guns trained on the local population, as long as they are ordered to bust down doors and drag Iraqi citizens out into the street -- bagging their heads and cuffing their wrists -- and haul them off for questioning somewhere, we fertilize their hatred against us.

In fact, given what happened at Abu Ghraib and other holding facilities in Iraq, we lost the Iraqi hearts and minds a long time ago.

A large majority of Iraqis want us to leave.

Our soldiers don't want to be there.

Top military men are in full revolt against the status quo. In an unprecedented display of dismay, they are retiring their commissions early to come out and say that the way the "war" is being waged is a farce.

Yet those responsible for this farce are still in their jobs -- "Yer doin' a good job, Rummy!"

There is an explanation for the disastrous state of affairs in Mesopotamia. Let me preface this by reminding us that nothing we were told in the pre-war buildup has turned out to be true. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to us or to his neighbors. We were not greeted with flowers. And our invasion and occupation sure as hell cannot be likened to a cakewalk.

There is an explanation for the disastrous state of affairs. We saw the new rationale, the new goalpost, laid out for us in the Chimp's press conference yesterday. Why are we in Iraq now? It is no longer the lofty notion of bringing democracy to the region. We are there now because Iraq is unstable, and we will stay until the job is done, that is, until Iraq reaches a point of "stability." How does that make sense, though ... how is that a reasonable goal?

It's clear that our continued occupation is the cause of instability, violence, chaos, resentment, and attacks. In fact, US intelligence agencies are uniformly of the opinion that we are breeding more terrorists by staying in Iraq. How does it make sense that staying another day will somehow magically change this fact? Simple answer: it doesn't.

There is an explanation for the ongoing disaster: we need an unstable Iraq to justify our continued presence. The longer we stay the more permanent bases we complete. The longer we stay, the more our permanent presence becomes the "facts on the ground." The longer we stay, the more resources in Iraq we can steal. The longer we stay, the more Iraqis who have means will leave the country. The longer we stay, the weaker the rest of the population becomes.

I ask myself, "Is it possible this administration is willing to be called incompetent and delusionary to cover for the real reasons we are there?" I ask myself, "Are the real reasons for our invasion and occupation any different from what they were initially? And if not, why should we believe the administration would tell us the truth now?" I doubt the real reasons are any more politically palatable than they were almost 4 years ago.

All this leads me to think we have only one option now... a military withdrawal, in as orderly a fashion as possible, and as quickly as possible. There are many who say, "But this will create a mess!" Yes, it is likely it will, at least in the near term. And we will have to face it, accept it, and recognize that this is the result of our misguided and mismanaged attempt at empire-building in the Middle East. We have to demand accountability from those responsible.

I thought, and wrote, a long time ago that the ill-conceived invasion was akin to opening Pandora's box. What's done is done. If we feel, as a nation, that we bear the responsibility to fix it, we first have to admit that we cannot fix it with guns and bombs and torture -- the very things that broke it in the first place.

We did break Iraq. On purpose. Our soldiers are not able to fix it, by the very nature of our armed forces. We are not fighting terrorism in Iraq, we are fighting Iraqi citizens. We've helped create a situation that has fractured Iraqi society and civilization. We've helped to pit Sunni against Shi'ite against Kurd.

All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put Iraq together again.

Bring our troops home now. Anything less is horribly cruel to our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. Anything less continues to hide the disaster we've created, on purpose, with the fiction that somehow our troops can make it better.

It's time we all accepted responsibility and face the music.