The last time we checked in on the controversy, a federal appeals court swiftly rejected the prosecution and admonished Biskupic for filing the charges in the first place. Thompson was released, but the imprisonment and wrongful prosecution has left quite a scar on her career.
Given the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Thompson expects reimbursement.
State Sen. Russ Decker (D), a member of the Claims Board, said he was inclined to support the request payment, but wants to see the U.S. Department of Justice foot the bill.
It’s not hard for me to rant about the ethos of the Bush Administration [as evidenced from these pages]. Most of my blog posts are about something they’ve done. But, I think the thing that niggles me when I read the news is the ethos they’ve created. Torture, for example, means that they’ve totally depersonalized the enemy. Guantanamo means the same thing. It’s a view of people that fits the term barbaric – the opposite of civil-ization. Their argument, "They do it, so we can too," sounds like "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" – the very mentality their religious figure of choice, Jesus, set out to reform several thousand years ago.
But it’s more than that. They were fine with ending the career of Valerie Plame because her husband was a critic. They let Scooter Libby take the fall for all of them. In their pleas for a pardon, they don’t say "we did it." They talk about his fine qualities, and make elitist arguments, but they don’t do the honorable thing – admit that he’s martyring himself to protect his boss. They continue to send our children, hustled off the streets by recruiters, to Iraq but don’t institute a draft that would put their own children at risk. They fired a group of perfectly laudible U.S. Attorneys because they did their jobs and didn’t bend to the nefariopus agenda of one Karl Rove. And they demonize Americans who are Liberal, or even moderate Democrats.
Georgia Thompson was a Civil Servant, doing her job. She lost her job, her reputation, and spent four months in jail because of it. She was a pawn in the campaign to discredit Democrats, and a vehicle for U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic’s to hold on to his job. [Scooter, listen up] She went straight to jail, pending her appeal. She’s a person – one of those people included under – "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The ethos of the Bush Administration does not take the actual lives of people into account – not the lives of our enemies, not the lives of our children, not the lives of our people. They just don’t care about people…
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