The Democrats, especially the Blue Dog Democrats in the House led by the powerful John Murtha (D-PA), are like a big lazy dog that doesn’t know its own size and strength. Let’s take stock of what the saner half of our nation has been able to directly and indirectly accomplish as a result:
Tom DeLay’s been hounded out of office amid mounting allegations of money laundering, influence peddling, legislation-for-hire, etc.
Duke Cunningham has been hounded out of office after being forced to confess to mainly the same things, only not for his party’s supremacy but his personal enrichment.
The Democrats directly achieved, after the mid-term elections, the hounding out of office of Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and gutting the Justice Department to the point where the #3 guy had to take over as acting AG when Gonzales scuttled out of office. Yet, it can also be posited that most of the muscle flexed by the Democrats seems to come from an extremely unlikely source: a slight, bald, late middle-aged California congressman named Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and his anonymous staff.
The non-partisan GAO (Government Accountability Office), the investigative arm of the justifiably maligned Congress, has proven to be a potent and thankfully well-publicized counterweight to the bullshit that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration and its bobbleheads. The GAO’s chief auditor, Comptroller General David Walker, recently came out and basically said, somewhat too politely, that what the Pentagon is telling us and what they’re finding in their independent audit are two different things.
For example: The GAO recently stated that, contrary to the cheerful spin that we’re hearing from the White House, that fewer Iraqis are getting slaughtered in hideous and painful ways than ever before but even this is false. The White House, in typical Big Brother fashion, when they cannot meet expectations and or promises with results, simply change the rules of the game by changing the definition of sectarian violence.
Now, a death doesn’t count depending on which part of an Iraqi's anatomy gets shredded. With a law enforcement agency, it doesn’t matter where the exit wound is: A murder is a murder. Shooting someone in the back is only a more cowardly and reprehensible way of killing someone.
The Democrats are also pushing back against testimony not due until Monday, not that that criticism is ever translated to significant opposition when it comes time to give Bush unconditional bucks. Petraeus and Crocker, the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of this Alice in Wonderland administration, of course will lie, lie and lie again, providing just enough less-than-good news, vermouth in a poisonous martini, to avoid the appearance of unconditional, undiluted cheer, resolving to have their battle. However, one cannot without some serious risk to their optimism rely on the Democrats to be as vocal in their skepticism, thereby breaking Petraeus’ and Crocker’s rattle as they are on the talking head circuit.
So, with all this unrealized muscle, how come articles of impeachment haven’t been put in motion against Bush and Cheney? How come Barack Obama is saying that impeachment ought to be reserved for special, more serious crimes? How come the Democratic party, despite the screaming clarion calls from the blogosphere that they pretend to embrace and acknowledge and polls that show their approval rating to be half of the vilified George W. Bush, cringe and bow and scrape at his feet when the inner circle is falling apart faster than a sandcastle at high tide?
I can understand, up to a point, a president’s or lawmaker’s bristling at the thought of being expected to lead and legislate according to poll numbers. That way lies failure in some degree. Every politician knows that s/he cannot satisfy every part of their constituency. It would take a very special, a near-universally popular issue to satisfy a constituency in massive numbers.
Like ending the war in Iraq, for instance.
Progressive voters, who helped get into office some of the very same people whose names we’d sung in paeans last year, are left scratching their heads when these self-same Democrats, these DINOs, voted to give Bush another year’s worth of money for the purposes of killing more people and further enriching the GOP-friendly corporate sector.
What is it they’re not telling us? I cannot find it in my heart to believe that middle-aged and elderly Democrats are so terrified of being called names like “terrorist appeasers” that it actually alters how they’d otherwise vote, which is to save lives by pulling out our troops.
But Rove is gone, piano wire and lead pipe and all. Bush has less protection than ever. What’s the hold-up?
And why weren’t these hearings that will take place tomorrow scheduled for the day after, which will be September 11th? You know, the day Iraq bombed us with our own planes hijacked by their phantom hijackers?
Update: It seems that there are two days of testimony, according to the NY Times, which will conclude on 9/11. So maybe there some hands at work that are crafting hideous irony.
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