Category Archives: Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals

According to my brother’s latest column, the blue-ribbon panel that is supposed to study intelligence prior to the Iraq war (albeit without subpoena power…) is not breaking any land speed records: “Five weeks after being appointed, the group has not met, and it is unclear when it will.”

How very convenient for the Administration. No meetings, no fuss about the committee’s authority. And no leaks.

Yes, it's really that bad. KR Washington Bureau: “The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.”

I am in awe of the genius of the Framers, who correctly warned us of the dangers of “faction” — the creation of party systems to which loyalty is greater than to the commonweal.

I am rueful of the fallibility of the Framers, who designed a system that:

1. tends so strongly to “faction” that there is no chance at all the either party would make executive branch heads roll even for a fraud of this magnitude;
2. hasn't scaled as well as it needed to — the imbalances in representation we have now in both voter/Senator and electoral votes/voter are much greater than they ever contemplated;
3. has too few antibodies generally against a morally corrupt bankrupt regime in the White House.

Of course, the Framers worked on assumptions about the nature of social relations, the economy, (small-R) republicanism, virtue, natural aristocracy and many other things that makes their world view at least different from mine if not downright archaic. Which is why stories like this one make me wonder if the 'great experiment' is going as well as it should…

(Other fulminations at TPM & BD's SDJ)

Remember how GW Bush promised to release all his military records? And then remember how that promise was inoperative the very next day? We still have not seen Bush's discharge papers. All it would take to put this to rest is a signed release by the ex-National Guardsman himself. But he hasn't done that…and people seem to have stopped demanding it. Why is that?

Lest we forget: Bush To Make Up Missed National Guard Service This Weekend

Oh, it's a nice headline in the New York Times: 9/11 Panel Rejects White House Limits on Interviews. Sure sounds like the commission found its spine at last, and won't accept the absurd one-hour limit (and chairs only, no members present, please) that Bush-Cheney invented to neuter the commission's investigation.

But read past the headline and the truth emerges. First, no Republicans are quoted; as the commission is split 50/50, that means that there isn't yet a majority to do anything forceful.

Plus, on background, the Republicans as signalling that they plan to cave in:

Commission officials said that if the White House continued to insist on limitations on the interviews with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, there might be little that the panel could do to force the issue and that the commission might have to accept the White House's terms.

And they said that despite internal conversation about the possibility of issuing a subpoena for Ms. Rice's public testimony, that move was unlikely.

Some spine, eh?