So now the great reporter Murray Waas, who probably discovered more than anyone else about the Plame "scandal," gets access to e-mails that have been illegally withheld from Congress by the Justice Department--e-mails confirming that Gonzales and the White House knew all along about the firing scheme and conspired to cover it up, e-mails which therefore prove that Gonzales has been lying in every word of his "testimony."

(For more information, go to talkingpointsmemo.com. For some reason blogger isn't letting me post links right now.)

Of course we knew this, but this kind of "revelation" is so clear that it would seem to promise immediate resignations and the total humiliation of the entire administration.

Where have I heard that before?

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At this point, it seems like these "revelations" are MORE destructive than not. It's as if we had a recording of Gonzales being played behind him--live in Congress, as he "testifies"--in which he can be heard to declare, "I hate this country, I want to kill Americans, I need Bush's penis in my asshole at all times, murder is fun, lying before Congress is my only purpose, shit tastes good, fuck God, I am not Hispanic and in fact hate all wetbacks, three cheers for Cho Seung-hui, etc., etc., etc...."

I guess you could call this sort of "news story" another confirmation of the Katrina Principle, which holds that the absolutely irrefutable announcement of the government's criminality and incompetence in effect neutralizes "scandal." The "revelations" are immediately complete, the suspense is dissipated, and "we" (and "the press") are left with the only apparently simple task of doing something about the fact that animated shit-sculptures fill every office of the executive branch.

The apparent unassailability of the system is most clearly revealed when its bankruptcy is perfectly manifest, and yet it persists intact. Each "revelation" is another nail in the already-sealed coffin of American constitutional government.

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In fact, nothing that I'm saying here is new. From the beginning (I said this in a 2003 post called "I am shit," and Finchy and Blicero and I have theorized this to death) Bush's power has been inseparable from his grotesquely obvious and inescapable criminal dementia. The very fact that such a piece of shit could be president proves that the office of the presidency, and the entire apparatus of government by spectacle, is inconceivably powerful and immoveable. The one who is "presidential" is the one who is said to be "president" and who fits into the "president"-slot in the image stream. The very fact that a manifestly unpresidential piece of shit could be made "presidential" by his placement in the "president"-slot proves that the real power resides in the unknowable flow of the image-stream itself, over and through all of us. Sweet.