Mar 10, 2007 at 11:37 PM by Political Chase
First, Nancy Pelosi primed W. with her blog post and then Frank Rich blasted W. to smithereens with his IED - a merciless pen. Crucifixion would have been less painful.
Rich begins his piece today with his classic style - you can see the smirk on his face as you read. That smirk quickly changes to stone-cold, grim reality. As I read this piece, I could feel Rich’s punches in my own gut as if I was W. If you are looking for the slap in the face followed by a chuckle that Frank Rich delivers so well, you will not find it here today.
Although, he doesn’t mention it, I can see that Frank has drawn heavily on his book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold. He has compressed some of the most significant elements of the book in this piece, such as the White House Iraq Group. Scooter Libby was in this group, which was the White House’s machine to create the war in Iraq. This small group bears 90+ percent of the responsibility for creating the mess this country cannot rid itself of.
EVEN by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.
A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements†and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of†the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.
Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.
Continue reading ‘Frank Rich blasts Bush to smithereens’
Mar 10, 2007 at 8:59 PM by Political Chase
Hell hath no fury like a Speaker of the House scorned. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has obviously had enough of George Bush promising to veto everything that comes out of Congress. If W. thought Pelosi was too timid to challenge him, all he needs to do is read her blog entry today…”look it up on the Internets or the Google, see…”
President Bush’s Iraq policies weaken our military’s readiness, dishonor our nation’s promises to our veterans, and fail to hold the Iraqi government accountable for overdue reforms.
By threatening to veto the House’s military funding bill, the President is walking away from his promise to the American people. The President has vowed to veto a bill that contains his own reform benchmarks for performance by the Iraqi government, our Defense Department’s own standards for troop readiness, and America’s promise to our veterans.
With his veto threat, the President offers only an open-ended commitment to a war without end that dangerously ignores the repeated warnings of military leaders, including the commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, who declared in Baghdad this week that the conflict cannot be resolved militarily.
The House of Representatives will soon have a chance to choose a new direction for the American people. The bill the President dismisses out of hand will measure the Iraqi government’s actions by the standards Mr. Bush himself set, conforms deployment of our troops to existing military standards for readiness, and provides badly needed help to an overburdened military and veterans’ medical system wracked by scandal.
Good for you Nancy Pelosi! Give that man hell.
Frankly, I think she’s just getting started. She’s been in this game a lot longer than Bush has and she has the support of the vast majority of the American people. W. doesn’t.
Mar 10, 2007 at 2:07 PM by Political Chase
I can just envision the shredding of paper and reformatting of hard drives on a pleasant Saturday afternoon.
The House Judiciary Committee plans to take a tour of the White House. Former White House Counselor Harriet Miers and “other unidentified White House officials” will be called to testify before the committee investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.
This obviously means the investigating committee has reason to believe the firings are not isolated and go beyond members of Congress pressuring the fired attorneys.
McClatchy Newspapers reports:
Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., chairwoman of the subcommittee directing the inquiry, sent a letter Friday to Miers, a longtime Bush loyalist who left her post in January, requesting that she submit to an interview.
They also sent a letter to Miers’ replacement, Fred Fielding. That letter asks that deputy counsel William Kelly and other White House officials yet to be named also agree to interviews.
The committee also is seeking all e-mails and paperwork between the White House and the Justice Department or any members of Congress related to the investigation.
“Until we get a clear and credible answer from the Bush administration on who made the decision to fire these U.S. attorneys and why they did it, we will continue our investigation,” Conyers said in a statement.
Mar 10, 2007 at 12:52 PM by Political Chase
As I mentioned previously, the FBI is illegally plundering in your private lives and yesterday FBI Director Robert Mueller stood before Congress, again, explaining why. Falling on his sword with statements of personal accountability, Mueller dutifully carries out the Penitential Order liturgy before Congress. Why does Congress continue to grant him absolution? I want to step through a few items that caught my attention in the New York Times article.
Mueller says:
How could this happen? Who is to be held accountable? And the answer to that is I am to be held accountable.
This ain’t the first or second time Mueller has pulled his groveling rug out. Is Mueller going to take action against himself or is George Bush going take action? Nothing is going to happen. Accountability means absolutely nothing in the Bush administration.
Mr. Mueller attributed the inaccuracies to “deficiencies in the database” and the failure to retain signed copies of national security letters in all cases.
“We have already taken steps to correct these deficiencies,” he said.
“Deficiencies in the database” is too ambiguous to make any determination about the nature of the problems, the severity or consequences. Mueller might as well have said, we messed up and stopped there. Furthermore, when did Mueller take steps to correct the problem(s) and what were those steps? Did he take these supposed steps three months ago and only reveals them now because he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar?
And then there is the ever-present innocence of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
[Gonzales] noted that the information discussed throughout [the inspector general's] document was the kind that the bureau “would have been entitled to if we had followed the rules.”
That is about as self-contradictory as it gets. We broke the rules to receive information that we were already had the right to get. That makes absolutely no sense and bears no purposeful logic. More importantly, whose rules? Gonzales’ rules or the rule of law? History has proven repeatedly the two are rarely the same. Bush and Gonzales make up rules as they go along, so that statement has zero credibility.
The Times report, based on statements made I presume, gives the impression that no one was harmed.
Although the investigation uncovered no examples of lives turned upside down or businesses disrupted, the privacy problems went beyond the theoretical in a few instances.
How does the FBI know? There were 142,000 national security letters issued between 2003 and 2005. The FBI followed up on 142,000 letters? They confirmed with every person(s) or organization that no harm was done? I don’t believe that for a minute. And, what about 2006?
Now, to the more encompassing issue. George Bush has promised repeatedly that proper controls were in place to keep his illegal surveillance programs from getting out of control and even more illegal (if that’s possible). So, where were all those promised procedures and why did they fail (like everything else Bush promises)?
I simply can’t wait until next week to find out what other screw ups this administration has done or plans to do.
Tags: FBI, Rober+Mueller, Alberto+Gonzales, surveillance
