Ladies on the Hill

It didn’t take long to be reminded that when it comes to scraping the bottom of the moral barrel, congressional Democrats do just as well as their counterparts on the Republican side although more as undisciplined free-lancers than in lockstep.

Thus Obama’s first clear break with Bush’s appalling misuse of the spy agencies to bamboozle the American people and lead us into crimes against human rights prompts California Senator Dianne Feinstein to rise up and criticize the choice because of CIA-pick Leon Panetta’s supposed ‘lack of experience’ in the intelligence field, which under the circumstances should be an excellent recommendation. By naming Panetta instead of a CIA insider, Obama suggests that no one from within the tainted agency should be rewarded at this time, an idea plenty of his voters would applaud.

But not Feinstein. Leave it to the centrist, ‘moderate’ Democrats to immediately squawk and complain, something they did precious little of when Bush was juicing up phony facts to justify the Iraq conquest and arranging for the torture of hundreds of suspects detained on flimsy charges. Feinstein not only went along with all that, she (and the loathesome Charles Schumer of my state) broke ranks and helped Bush shoehorn our current Attorney General into office, thus assuring continued impunity for all those complicit with the infamous torture memos and the politicizing of the entire Justice Department.

Whereas Republicans could spend six months parsing Clinton’s use of the word ‘is’, these Democratic stalwarts didn’t even bother to insist that Michael Mukasey define ‘torture’ as he sailed through his congressional hearing with their blessing.

It’s hard to imagine a Republican senator daring to defy an incoming president from their own party with a decisive electoral mandate given that outfit’s notoriously vindictive approach to wielding power. But Feinstein—like her equally complicit colleague Jay Rockefeller, also unhappy with Panetta—may be more worried about having excessive light shown on their own cooperation with the crimes of the last decade.

Meanwhile, across the Capitol a woman named Carolyn is showing why she should take the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. No, not the latest celebrity from Eastern Hollywood but Queens/Manhattan Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney who grilled the Inspector General from the useless Securities and Exchange Commission over its monumental failure to do its job. The IG, an annoying pipsqueak who spoke in layers of conditional-tense, say-nothing verbiage, had his only moments of discomfort when Maloney blasted his agency for standing by while her constituents were bilked and New York’s financial industry driven into the ground as a laughingstock.

The SEC should be in receivership by now after failing to uncover a decades-old Ponzi scheme at the heart of Wall Street, not permitted to engage in chin-stroking discussions about how it plans to investigate itself. Maloney was the only Member I saw take part in the hearing who came close to the outrage that the Madoff debacle merits. That’s what we need in the Senate, not more photo-ops.