Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Accountability
Bush, Cheney et al. are finally getting some:
When the Rubber Stamp GOP Congress was in charge, all of this stuff was swept under the rug. Now with a Democratic Congress in both the House and the Senate, we can get to the bottom of all these matter and see that wrongdoing is punished and wrongdoers convicted and put in jail (unless Bush pardons them all, of course.)
That's why winning back both the House and Senate last November was so important for the future of the country. This administration and the corrupt people in the Grand Old Party have been basically running things without any accountability and any oversight whatsoever.
Now we get oversight, now we get accountability and now we get justice.
Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. "We had an accountability moment," he replied, "and that's called the 2004 elections."
Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but this one isn't working out as well. The conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has coincided with a string of investigations into the mistreatment of injured soldiers and the purge of federal prosecutors, putting the operations of his administration into harsh relief.
The timing may be coincidental, but the confluence of events has revived a pattern largely missing through the six years of Bush's presidency, in which high-level officials accused of wrongdoing are grilled, fired and sometimes even jailed. For an administration that has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger.
While the president's aides watch uncomfortably as one hearing after another plays out on Capitol Hill, the Libby conviction hit a nerve inside the White House. The onetime chief of staff to Vice President Cheney was well liked in the West Wing, and the notion of him going to prison dispirited the colleagues glued to televisions as the verdict was announced. Bush watched in the Oval Office with aides Joshua B. Bolten and Dan Bartlett, then instructed Bartlett to put out a statement expressing sadness for Libby.
"This has been a huge cloud over the White House," said Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist close to the Bush team. "It caused a lot of intellectual, emotional and political energy to be expended when it should have been expended on the agenda. They're never going to fully recover from this. If you're looking at legacy, this episode gets prominently mentioned in every recap of the Bush administration, much like Iran-contra and Monica Lewinsky."
...
"This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear," said Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), Bush's Democratic challenger in 2004.
When the Rubber Stamp GOP Congress was in charge, all of this stuff was swept under the rug. Now with a Democratic Congress in both the House and the Senate, we can get to the bottom of all these matter and see that wrongdoing is punished and wrongdoers convicted and put in jail (unless Bush pardons them all, of course.)
That's why winning back both the House and Senate last November was so important for the future of the country. This administration and the corrupt people in the Grand Old Party have been basically running things without any accountability and any oversight whatsoever.
Now we get oversight, now we get accountability and now we get justice.
