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Perfect Sturm und Drang
 There’s just too much of a wild good thing roiling around in Washington these days. Like a blizzard just before you go skiing, or a hurricane rolling in just as you put your board in the water – it’s dangerous for some, but a lot of fun for others.
The name “Abramoff” is still producing uncontrollable winces from many members of Congress, and the White House – including Karl Rove’s office – and will for some time to come. Because if any of those dumb goyishim pols think that big hat Jack is stand-up guy, they’re dumber than they seem.
The CIA’s April National Intelligence Estimate (which only the administration was privy to until September) laid out present and likely future events in Iraq, documenting and quantifying the lies the Bush administration has been telling us about the war. Thank you very much.
Sen. George Allen (R-VA) saw his safe senate seat shift to the up-for-grabs column almost overnight when the 2008 presidential aspirant got his racist tongue caught in a wringer over “Macaca,” then got kaught kozy with the Konservative Kitizens Kouncil, and laid bare as a knuckle-dragging moron. About time.
Then Bob Woodward, after writing two books for the 60% of the people who used to like Bush, wrote “State of Denial” for the 60% who don’t like him now. The book reveals what many of us (but not Bob Woodward) have suspected all along – or at least since the 9-11 Commission released the story about the August 6, 2001 bin Laden PDB that Bush ignored in favor of brush clearing and fishing. Woodward tells us that on July 10, 2001, CIA Director and Medal of Freedom recipient George Tenet briefed then-Nat’l Security Advisor Condi Rice about an imminent al Qaeda attack on the US. Condi, who down played the importance of the bin Laden PDB before the 9-11 Commission, said earlier this week that she couldn’t recall any such meeting with Tenet. But the White House log indicates otherwise. And now her former office claims that not only did she take Tenet deadly serious, she urged him to brief Rummy and then-Att’y Gen’ Ashcroft too. First he’s heard of it, says Ashcroft. Condi too, apparently.
Now we’ve learned that the 9-11 Commission received the same Tenet Power Point presentation during their investigation, but chose to leave it out of the official report. Why? Possibly because it added to the preponderance of evidence that the Bushies – either out of Machiavellian intent or plain incompetence – allowed the 9-11 attacks to happen.
Next, Mark Foley, a favorite congressman of the religious right, was outed as a pedophile. And then the House leadership, including Speaker Hastert, was outed as complicit in the tawdry crime, and the cover-up. At the moment, Hastert, Boehner, and Reynolds are doing their best Three Stooges impersonation, shrugging and pointing fingers at one another. Boehner can’t remember what he told Foley or when, if he told him anything at all. Reynolds told somebody something, and that’s all he has to say, and Hastert has no clear recollection of anything, including what Foley even looks like.
What’s clear to the rest of us is that protecting moneybags Foley and his can’t-lose House seat was far more important to House Republicans than protecting House pages from this wanker. So the shit storm isn’t going away – in fact, it’s been out there since Reagan-Bush administration’s kiddie cavalcades.
Will Hastert be stripped of power and banned to the back benches where Tom Delay found him when he needed a patsy to run the House? And is the rest of the Republican leadership too compromised to fill the breach? Wouldn’t a major Congressional shake up just four weeks before a mid-term election put an uncomfortable bunch in Karl Rove’s boxers…
Low-life Matt Drudge, the intrepid journalist who broke the Lewinsky affair (and not that it entirely obviates Clinton’s offense, but Monica was 23 years old at the time), had this to say about Foley’s underage victims. Drudge says no-harm-no-foul because adolescent Internet culture is a hotbed of sexual innuendo, and besides, the “16-year old beasts” were “egging the Congressman on.” Of course, had it been an undercover police officer on the other end of Foley’s predatory IMs, he wouldn’t be getting the L. Ron Hubbard treatment down in Clearwater FL at the moment, he’d be in the DC lock up awaiting arraignment – where he belongs.
So, a month before election day, where does all this leave the right-wing phonies who have stolen elections, gerrymandered themselves into unassailable voting districts, and subverted the Constitution in ways no one would have believed possible six short years ago? Right where we want them.
~Jack McEnany
Also see: Deliscioso
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