The House Will Allow Subpoenas In Attorney Riff

CNN     March 21, 2007

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- House Democrats voted Wednesday to give their leaders the authority to force White House officials to testify on the firings of U.S. attorneys.

President Bush on Tuesday offered to let Karl Rove, his top political adviser, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers give unsworn, off-the-record testimony.

A House Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday rejected the offer on a voice vote. Democrats contend the lack of transcripts under the Bush plan would prevent them from challenging any inconsistencies in testimony.

On Tuesday, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Bush's offer was unacceptable.

"It is not helpful to be telling the Senate how to do our investigation," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, said in a written statement.

The House Judiciary subcommittee vote Wednesday authorizes issuing of subpoenas, not the serving of them. That action would come later.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on the same issue Thursday.

* * * *

  Bush has said, "It would be regrettable if they choose to go down the road of issuing subpoenas."

   Oh really? Who would it be  regrettable for?  My guess would be for Bush and the rest of the White House and you can also throw in the underlings of Gonzales who helped with the " purge ' knowing full well that is was the wrong thing to do.

  Bush has got to be an ass if he thinks that the Democrats or anyone else with an I.Q. will just let Rove and the rest come in and testify without having some sort of record of the conversation. I guess that Bush and Cheney have gotten so used to hiding and destroying so much shit that they think that it is the normal thing to do.

  It is pretty obvious that the White house has alot to hide if they are so afraid of letting their hoods testify under oath and behind closed doors. These request pretty much say " guilty ".

   Bush will now run this crap through the courts and hope that he can drag this case out till he is out of office when he will think that he, and the others,  are safe from prosecution.

   I hope that he hasn't made any vacation plans for out of the states.

 

Technorati tags: Sen. Patrick Leahy, George Bush, Senate Judiciary Committee, House Democrats, Gonzales

 

Iraq: Playing The Course

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Iraq: Playing the Course (and Cheating)

posted by Jeff Huber

Also at DKos.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
--Voltaire
Pro-war rhetoric continues to resonate of the peculiar neoconservative brand of insanity. Last week, Representative C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) said, "Nobody wants our troops out of Iraq more than I do, but we can't afford to turn over Iraq to al-Qaida."
The Sunni organization al-Qaeda is not going to take over Shiite dominated Iraq. If Young honestly thinks it can, he's an utter dullard. It's more likely that Young was the Bush liegeman chosen to introduce the latest Rovewellian talking point.
Staying the Course
From the beginning, The administration and its echo chamberlains have sold their woebegone war in Iraq with a fabric of glittering generalities, appeals to emotion, bandwagons, sand bagging, blame shifting, straw man attacks, faulty main assumptions, false analogies, and the rest of the propaganda arsenal. They coaxed us into this war by making visions of mushroom clouds dance in our heads, and they've been playing Rovewellian mind games with us ever since.
Their most enduring trick has been the "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" mantra. In recent months "fighting them over there" has morphed into "If we withdraw, they will follow us here." Pish. How are they going to get here--hide in our troops' luggage? Swim? Wind surf? Jump?
Despite what Bush the younger tells us, the oceans do, in fact, still protect us. Nobody has an army large enough to invade and occupy the United States, and they certainly don't have a navy or air force capable of transporting a force that size across the Atlantic or Pacific. Even if they did, we could sink them and/or shoot them down before they got halfway here.
Yes, terrorists might still sneak through our borders and ports in drips and drabs like the 9/11 perpetrators did, but nothing we're doing militarily in the Middle East is preventing that from happening. That's Homeland Security's job, and if Homeland Security can't keep terrorists from infiltrating our country, why does it even exist?
Young Mr. Bush exhorts us to show "resolve" in the Middle East. But the kind of resolve we're showing in the Middle East is the kind of resolve it takes to throw yourself in front of a moving bus, and then lie there while the bus continues to roll back and forth over you.
In January, Senator Joe Lieberman (?-CT) said on Meet the Press that "We all want to find the right exit strategy. But my own sense of history tells me that in war, ultimately, there are two exit strategies. One is called victory; the other is called defeat."
My three dogs have a better sense of history than Lieberman does. Wars, especially modern American wars, have seldom been decisive. World War I ended in an armistice, the conditions of which laid the groundwork for World War II. World War II concluded with the formal surrenders of Germany and Japan, but that only led to the Cold War and a series of dirty little third world proxy wars that lasted for half a century.
One pro-war neoconservative pundit recently compared Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA) to Lee Harvey Oswald. He said that Murtha and Oswald formed a small club of individuals who deserved to be classified as "ex-Marines." This pundit is not a Coulter-class luminary in the neoconservative galaxy. He is a distinguished dean and professor at one of our most distinguished graduate level war colleges who consistently indulges in this kind of vituperative through the Big Brother Broadcast megaphone. With people like him in key positions of upper level of military academia, it's little wonder our national security brain trust is so bankrupt.
We hear from voices on the right that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will create conditions that could lead to a regional war, but the fact is that U.S. presence in Iraq has created a regional war. Conflict, at one level or another, rages from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan, and our presence in Iraq is fueling it, not containing it.
The Bush war hawks keep serving up grape flavored hallucinogen shooters, and their non-cognitive supporters keep slamming them down. Meanwhile, a pack of dune farmers armed with tinker toys continue to make the "best-trained, best-equipped" armed force in history look like it couldn't find its oasis with a map and a flashlight.
It's so difficult for me to watch our chicken hawk leaders pour more of our magnificent troops into a war they're not designed to fight in pursuit of a "victory" that cannot be defined, and justify their policies and strategies with arguments they have to know are medicine show hokum, and blame their failures on the CIA, the news media, Catholics who voted for John Kerry, and whatever other scapegoat is handy.
It breaks my heart.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.

 

Technorati tags: Iraq, Bush, John Murtha