Coming from the man who dismantled the Civil Rights Division at Justice and turned the Civil Rights Commission into a toothless joke after it criticized his administration for doing nothing about civil rights, this is obscene.

Washington -- President Bush on Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to relinquish her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., by signing legislation to place a statue of the late civil rights heroine in the Capitol.

Bush elevated a routine bill signing into a high-profile White House ceremony that brought together African American officials in the Bush administration led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, African American veterans of the civil rights movement and politicians from both political parties, including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the defeated Democratic presidential candidate last year and the sponsor of the measure in the Senate.

"What had begun as a simple act of civil disobedience ended up galvanizing the modern movement for civil rights," Bush told more than 100 invited guests. "On this day, we remember the great inspiration this movement drew from the quiet courage shown by an Alabama woman riding home on a Cleveland Avenue bus."

But that's the Bush Administration all over: they'll put up statues for them to pose in front of at the same time they're vigorously trying to bring back Jim Crow. From the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago:

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation's anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees.

Nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.

At the same time, prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.

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"Most everyone in the Civil Rights Division realized that with the change of administration, there would be some cutting back of some cases," said Richard Ugelow, who left the division in 2004 and now teaches law at American University. "But I don't think people anticipated that it would go this far, that enforcement would be cut back to the point that people felt like they were spinning their wheels." (emphasis added)

Dozens of lawyers have resigned from the CRD rather than defend a civil rights agenda that is profoundly antagonistic to civil rights. Go figure.

So the Emperor gets to make a speech honoring the memory of a woman who fought for everything he's trying to destroy. SOP for the Shrub, so common it's hardly worth mentioning.

(WaPo link via MoJo, where you can read about the hundreds of administration officials who have resigned or been fired for telling the truth over the last five years. Hundreds.)

Update: It's a two-fer!

After cutting his promised $15B in funds to fight AIDS down to $3B, dispensing only a third of that much, most of it to abstinence-only programs that don't work, and then backing the pharmaceutical industries' initial refusal to cut its outrageous prices for anti-AIDS drugs in Africa (they were later shamed into it by the rest of the world, not us), the Emperor took advantage of World AIDS Day to crow about his 'contribution'.

President Bush said Thursday that his 2-year-old overseas AIDS initiative had brought antiviral drugs to 400,000 HIV-infected people in Africa and was on track to treat 2 million by early 2009.

That is, at worst, another of the Emperor's flat-out lies. At best it's a gross exaggeration. If there are that many people being reached, it's in spite of him, not because of him.

But don't let that stop you from taking all the credit, Your Imperial Majesticness. It never did before.