The Bush Administration has been very skillful at keeping things out of the public eye.
It is no coincidence that at a time when there is rising tide of items showing that the Bush people are competent only in the areas that are to their advantage, and are totally inept in areas of protecting America, protecting American service people, and protecting Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights and civil liberties.
It is not likely that the same people can be both the most competent and the least competent. The adage to follow the money presents the Bush people – and their allies, the former GOP majority in the Congress, shows how it is that they can sometimes know exactly what they are doing, and at other times, they claim to not have a clue.
Now that the Democrats have a majority in each house of Congress, many people who really hate the Bush crowd are calling loudly for impeachment. This is not a high probability item, at this time, regardless of the intentions of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.. There are a lot of Blue Dog Democrats who might not vote for impeachment in The House. And, as the Republicans demonstrated when they tried to run Bill Clinton out of town, a Bill of Impeachment does not guarantee a removal from office. They also demonstrated something else: raising the subject helped them to rouse their troops, and to get the undecided voters to vote for The Elephant at the next election.
On Friday, Mr. Waxman will initiate hearings about the Valerie Plame matter. Mr. Waxman has not shared anything with Diogenes. We anticipate that the committee will talk with Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the eponymous Miss Plame, and others They can talk about the harm done to them, personally by the Bush Administration. There should be people who now work at the CIA, or who worked there until it got even more politicized in the last few years, and these people should be able to talk about the harm that was done to the United States. If Diogenes were present, he might want to talk to Scooter Libby, to ask why Libby did not testify on his own behalf, and to ask Libby to talk about how involved Dick Cheney was in exposing the identity of Plame. The Special Prosecutor decided that he could not prosecute, Karl Rove. Rove had quite a lot to tell the grand jury, and it would be very useful to have him answer questions in public. If Rove has to invoke the Fifth Amendment repeatedly, it would give an accurate impression that he still ahs something to protect, personally. And if he does answer, he will have to give the correct impression that the Bush White House is run along the same lines as an organized crime family.
Rep. Henry Waxman has the right idea. Hearings about subjects that are important to America. Perhaps after they find out all about the Plame matter, they can address the way the Bush people manipulated the information that led our elected leaders to give authority to Mr. Bush. Not only the way they manipulated the media into supporting their drumbeat for war, but also the way they created CIA reports out of whole cloth.
An appropriate committee should be able to get Secretary of State Powell’s chief of staff, who has not been shy about the lying. Then, the Secretary should be brought in, to repeat and elucidate on the apology he made for lying, about ten seconds worth, several years ago.
Not screaming matches, but relevant questions and answers that are interesting, whether they are DC Kabuki or not. The mainstream media, formerly called the Liberal Media, have been able to ignore most of the dirty aspects of the Bush Administration, preferring to say that the problems area due to stupidity rather than incompetence. The Bush people like to have the media portray hem as stupid, because that kind of action is forgivable.
There are a lot of things that various committees can investigate, certainly enough to take up a god deal of the time from now until the 2008 elections.
Diogenes remembers that the Bush people blamed Mike Brown for the problems in New Orleans? No doubt, Mike Brown was an inappropriate choice to be FEMA Director. But Mike Brown was not the Bush appointee who said on national television that New Orleans was not flooded. That honor went to Michael Chertoff, who is still Secretary of Homeland Security. The things that went wrong in New Orleans were not only with FEMA. Any committee investigating the New Orleans disaster should look into some things that are still not evident. For example, the Bush people let contracts after the Hurricane, and of course they gave those contracts to their friends. It happened that there were many contracting companies who wanted to do work in New Orleans, and who had work crews nearby. The companies that did get the contracts did not subcontract to those local companies, who might have been best able to do the actual work, but they did subcontract to other companies, who hired other subcontractors. In the end, the work was done by laborers brought in at the lowest cost, mostly illegal immigrants who were paid so little that they required public assistance from the local authorities. Louisiana is a state where the Elephants thought they could pick up a Senate seat, and found a way to get some large number of Democrats out of the state, to tip the election into the red. Someone ought to ask about that, with sufficient work ahead of time to actually get answers.
The Army is now trying to dig itself out of the cesspool of revelations about medical care of injured Iraq soldiers. The Vice President was very clear over the weekend, that he will not allow any bureaucrat to stand in the way of the investigation of the mess in the Army and the VA hospitals. There should be a good many bureaucrats – some of them Republicans – who should want to speak out about the wretched conditions caused by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. For that matter, Mr. Rumsfeld ought to have something to say, and if he does not, he should be brought before the investigating committee by subpoena, and preferably in chains.
Last week the Department of Justice issued a report showing that the FBI improperly handled wiretap cases. A team of serious investigators should be in there, asking Justice to identify the cases that were handled unlawfully. The individual FBI agents responsible should be questioned, one at a time, and each one should be asked if the illegal operation was his own responsibility, or if the idea came from the office of the Director, or the office of the Attorney General, or maybe higher yet.
Diogenes is looking forward to seeing pictures on every nightly newscast for the next two years, of Bush appointees exposed as villains and charlatans. It might make up for having to see the photo of Monica every night for two years, and will be more appropriate, as well.
