March of the dunces

I’m blowing off a protest today, mostly because I need to make money to consume the bounty of this great nation. But the protest I’m missing is the March of the Dead. They’re forming up right now as I type this at a trendy Cosi coffee shop on Capitol Hill to form a long march about 500 meters long to the Capitol Building. Why?

We have now for the second time elected a Congress to end the occupation of Iraq, and this time we will insist that it be ended. A treaty unratified by the Senate cannot legalize three more years of war.

Um, folks, Congress has been on the side of continuing the war since the beginning. Not only that, they’ve fully supported the Bush Administration’s handling of the war…well, except in public. Look at today’s Wall Street Journal;

Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA’s covert antiterror interrogation programs. They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren’t fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let’s review the history the political class would prefer to forget.

According to our sources and media reports we’ve corroborated, the classified briefings began in the spring of 2002 and dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-value al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan. In succeeding months and years, more than 30 Congressional sessions were specifically devoted to the interrogation program and its methods, including waterboarding and other aggressive techniques designed to squeeze intelligence out of hardened detainees like Zubaydah.

The briefings were first available to the Chairmen and ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees. From 2003 through 2006, that gang of four included Democrats Bob Graham and John D. Rockefeller in the Senate and Jane Harman in the House, as well as Republicans Porter Goss, Peter Hoekstra, Richard Shelby and Pat Roberts. Senior staffers were sometimes present. After September 2006, when President Bush publicly acknowledged the program, the interrogation briefings were opened to the full committees.

If Congress wanted to kill this program, all it had to do was withhold funding. And if Democrats thought it was illegal or really found the CIA’s activities so heinous, one of them could have made a whistle-blowing floor statement under the protection of the Constitution’s speech and debate clause. They’d have broken their secrecy oaths and jeopardized national security, sure. But if they believed that Bush policies were truly criminal, didn’t they have a moral obligation to do so?

Democrats didn’t get upset about the Bush intelligence programs until it became a popular way to club the Bush Administration. When it became politically expedient. Now that they have complete control of government, where’s their motivation to do what the anti-war crowds want them to do?

Yeah, they acted like they wanted to end the war, they passed bills they knew would fail in the Senate and be vetoed by the President and they fooled you into voting for them once again. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi pulled the wool over your eyes. March on them every day – nothing is going to change. Do you think they’ll investigate the Bush Administration? Not on your life – because if they did, the fact that Democrats were complicit would be uncovered.

52=Suckers.

Category: Politics