When a religious goody twoshoes gets to join the inner sanctum of power

She finds herself doing things she knows are wrong.... but it was really all in God's name... really!:

A federal judge approved an immunity deal Friday allowing former Justice Department aide Monica Goodling to testify before Congress about the firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Goodling, who served as the department's White House liaison, has refused to discuss the firings without a guarantee that she will not be prosecuted. Congress agreed to the deal, Justice Department investigators reluctantly agreed not to oppose it and U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan gave it final approval Friday.

"Monica Goodling may not refuse to testify," Hogan began his brief order, which said that Goodling could not be prosecuted for anything other than perjury in connection with her testimony.

Remember, even though there has been horrific damage done to the Department of Justice, she really really feels it:

May 4 (Bloomberg) -- A former U.S. Justice Department official and central figure in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys tearfully told a colleague two months ago her government career probably was over as the matter was about to erupt into a political storm, according to closed-door congressional testimony.

Monica Goodling, at the time an aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, sobbed for 45 minutes in the office of career Justice Department official David Margolis on March 8 as she related her fears that she would have to quit, according to congressional aides briefed on Margolis's private testimony to House and Senate investigators. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity.

Margolis's description of the emotional scene in his office sheds new light on divisions that were developing in the Justice Department's Washington headquarters as the Democratic-controlled Congress was demanding documents that might show White House involvement in the dismissals.

Goodling, 33, who was Gonzales's White House liaison, resigned April 6 and has invoked her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to refuse to answer lawmakers' questions about her role in the firings. Her lawyers cited accusations by Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty that Goodling and others had misled him about the firings as a basis for refusing to testify.

Oh... wait. She's crying about losing her job, isn't she?

Update: The New York Times:

“She was inexperienced, way too naïve and a little overzealous,” said Mr. Cummins, a Republican from Arkansas. “She might have somehow figured that what she was doing was the right thing. But a more experienced person would understand you don’t help the party by trying to put political people in there. You put the best people you can find in there.”

Ms. Goodling, now 33, arrived at the department at the start of the Bush administration after working as an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee during the 2000 presidential campaign.

Her legal experience was limited; she had graduated in 1999 from Regent University School of Law, which was founded by Pat Robertson. Deeply religious and politically conservative, Ms. Goodling seemed to believe that part of her job was to bring people with similar values into the Justice Department, several former colleagues said.

Mitt Romney said Pat Robertson strengthens the pillars of our community?

The guy who said God told him there would be nukes in 2007? A PILLAR? Mitt Romney gave the commencement address at Regent University, Monica Goodling's alma mater, the very school that is dedicated to the destruction of the separation between church and state. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, talking to a fundamentalist Christianist who is sure LDS is a cult and not a religion???

Think Progress helpfully reminds us of Pat Robertson's wonderful Christian attitude:

Robertson on the vote in Dover, PA in support of evolution science:

I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.

Robertson on September 11:

Two days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Robertson held a conversation with Jerry Falwell on Mr. Robertson’s TV show “The 700 Club.” Mr. Falwell laid blame for the attack at the feet of “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians,” not to mention the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way. “Well, I totally concur,” said Mr. Robertson.

Robertson on Islam:

I believe it’s motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with. … [T]he goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is world domination.

Robertson on former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke:

Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke was the result of Sharon’s policy, which he claimed is “dividing God’s land.”

Robertson on assassinating Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez:

I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

Robertson on the federal judiciary being a greater threat than al Qaeda:

Q: You’ve said that Liberals are engaged in an all-out assault on Christianity…and that the out-of-control judiciary, and this was in your last book “Courting Disaster” is the most serious threat America has faced in nearly 400 years of history, more serious than al Qaeda, more serious than Nazi Germany and Japan, more serious than the Civil War?

Pat Robertson: George, I really believe that.

Wow. Good choice, Mitt.

The infestation of christianists

In the Bush administration who graduated from Regent University number 150. The only qualification they hold for the jobs they have is that they have a christianist agenda: Dissolve the separation between church and state.



Paul Krugman (via jurassicpork at Welcome To Pottersville):

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.” And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.

[snip]

One measure of just how many Bushies were appointed to promote a religious agenda is how often a Christian right connection surfaces when we learn about a Bush administration scandal.

There’s Ms. Goodling, of course. But did you know that Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota — three of whose deputies recently stepped down, reportedly in protest over her management style — is, according to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses in the office?

Or there’s the case of Claude Allen, the presidential aide and former deputy secretary of health and human services, who stepped down after being investigated for petty theft. Most press reports, though they mentioned Mr. Allen’s faith, failed to convey the fact that he built his career as a man of the hard-line Christian right.

And there’s another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer extremism of these people.

You see, Regent isn’t a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It’s run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God’s punishment for America’s sins.

How close are we to the lusted after theocracy in America? Will these power-hungry religious leaders look the other way while allowing an ever-so-convenient terrorist attack that would hurtle the citizens of the United States into the arms of these religious extremists?

I mean... if you've waited and waited for the Second Coming all your life, wouldn't you be tempted to ... help it happen?

When you run such a bad school you can't earn accreditation

The obvious thing to do is change the rules.

Thers of Whiskey Fire:

Last month the Dept of Education issued a proposal to strengthen its hold over college accreditation bodies -- broadly speaking, the organizations that set the standards for public and private colleges and universities. Inside Higher Ed sums up the proposals:

The draft language, which will be considered next week by a federal panel weighing possible changes in federal rules governing higher education accreditation, would give accreditors three options for measuring institutions’ success in educating students — two of which force them to set minimal levels of acceptable performance, which accreditors (and many college officials) have traditionally considered it inappropriate for them to do.

The department’s proposals would also require accrediting agencies to bar the colleges they monitor from basing decisions about whether to accept a transfer student’s academic credits on the accreditation status of the “sending” institution, and significantly increase the amount and types of information that accrediting groups would have to make public.

There's a lot to discuss in that first paragraph. But here let's highlight the second part: "The department’s proposals would also require accrediting agencies to bar the colleges they monitor from basing decisions about whether to accept a transfer student’s academic credits on the accreditation status of the 'sending' institution."

It's an arcane-sounding point, but what it really is, is a big giveaway to schools like The King's College, which I discuss here. Religious wingnutty schools like that have trouble getting accreditation from one of the regional bodies, which leads to trouble when students want to transfer their credits to schools that are accredited in the usual way.

These people don't miss a trick. The overall goal is to create a parallel ideological universe, a nation with a nation, one with its own rules and even laws.

When you don't like the truth, challenge the facts. When your faith is threatened by science, disparage science. When you want a theocracy, flood the judicial system with your minions.

From the Carpetbagger Report:

Thanks to the prosecutor purge scandal, and former Alberto Gonzales aide Monica Goodling’s role in it, the public is learning about Robertson’s Regent University, which, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted over the weekend, is doing exactly what it set out to do.

Goodling is only one of 150 graduates of Regent University currently serving in this administration, as Regent’s Web site proclaims proudly, a huge number for a 29-year-old school. Regent estimates that “approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work.” And that’s precisely what its founder desired. The school’s motto is “Christian Leadership To Change the World,” and the world seems to be changing apace. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft teaches at Regent, and graduates have achieved senior positions in the Bush administration. The express goal is not only to tear down the wall between church and state in America (a “lie of the left,” according to Robertson) but also to enmesh the two.

The law school’s dean, Jeffrey A. Brauch, urges in his “vision” statement that students reflect upon “the critical role the Christian faith should play in our legal system.” Jason Eige (’99), senior assistant to Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, puts it pithily in the alumni newsletter, Regent Remark: “Your Resume Is God’s Instrument.”

As Christopher Hayes explained in The American Prospect, more than two-thirds of Regent students identified themselves as Republicans, but the numbers aren’t as important as the school’s mission. As Hayes noted, “what students are taught at a place like Regent, or even Calvin and Wheaton, is to live out a Christ-centered existence in all facets of their lives. But what they learn is to become Republicans.”

Slate’s Lithwick suggests the more significant problem here is that these Regent grads left Robertson’s confines confused: “Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God’s work with the president’s.” I think there’s some truth to that — Regent grads may be convinced that Bush is somehow God’s messenger on earth — but I suspect the problem is more practical than that.

Thanks to Robertson’s minions infiltrating Bush’s Justice Department, religious right activists are literally helping drive federal law enforcement, particularly when it comes to civil rights and picking U.S. Attorneys.

The Bush administration really does believe it can change reality.
Just to remind you, a quote from a senior adviser to Bush in 2002:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.