Thugs and Consiglieres

The Bushite torturers will get theirs some day, and I hope I’m alive to see it. However, there is something particularly oily and nauseating about the faux criticism from people who knew what was happening all along and abetted the crimes willingly. Our homegrown star collaborator is Nancy Pelosi who, turns out, was one of the few in Washington privy to the official crimes, which she faithfully kept secret.

The particular twisted spin Pelosi and others use to get themselves off the hook is that they swore to uphold national security secrets. Here’s NP herself on the topic [all quotes cribbed from a Ray McGovern post on CommonDreams.org]:

When the administration notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear expectation that the information will be shared by no one, including other members of the intelligence committees.

How convenient for everyone! The crimes are committed; four screened and vetted legislators of the 535-member Congress get the skinny, thus fulfilling the ‘consultation’ requirement; no one can breathe a word of any of it, assuring that the oversight is meaningless; and when the poo-poo flies, no one is responsible.

Even the apparently decent Dick Durbin of Illinois got seduced into this abandonment of his legislative, not to mention moral, mandate:

We’re duty-bound once we enter that room to respect classified information. Everything you hear is supposed to stay in the room…I certainly had enough to know that the statements that were made about mushroom clouds were not the conclusions of someone in the administration who was really being honest about the full debate. But you really know, walking in the room, what the rules of the game will be.

Well, Dick, maybe you shouldn’t be playing along by them! Perhaps it isn’t so important to be one of the big players getting to hear all the cool secrets if the cost is betraying your public trust.

I am old enough to remember the exact same weaselly bobbing and dodging among the pious Democrats during the carnage of the Vietnam war when they proved again and again, with extremely scarce exceptions, that they cared more about their pathetic sinecures than another million or so human lives. I am not surprised, only depressed, to see it all once again.