A very useful collection for personal and collective action talking points for debates with so-called 'fence sitters'.
Justice à l'orange
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The Bush administration has been in trouble ever since its arrogance met its incompetence at Intelligence Pass last summer; ever since Plame Gate began (see below), ever since George's guys tried to solve their problems -- all those already nagging lies and exaggerations, all the fun and games that panicked a country into war -- by throwing CIA director George Tenet to the sharks, and he refused to walk the plank.
Ever since then, they've been gathering angry constituencies -- in the military, in the "intelligence community," in Congress, in the bureaucracy, in the media, even on the right -- and trailing behind them an ever growing gaggle of barely suppressed scandals, investigative committees, nosy commissions, grand juries, and intra-bureaucratic buck-passing. Their pattern -- not completely unfamiliar, if you think back to previous administrations -- has been to mount the barricades, declare, "Thus far, and no farther… they shall not pass," and then, when the weather gets heavy, fall back to the next set of barricades.
The attorney general will not recuse himself; no special prosecutor will be appointed…. You complete that one. The president will not testify; the president will testify but only before one or two people and not under oath… and so forth. If you watched carefully, you would see the administration slowly and quietly giving ground for some time on issue after issue, problem after problem, a sign of weakness -- and an explanation, in part, for the sudden loss of media docility. (The pack smells blood.)
Recently, the pace has been upped. We're already in the midst of an early, down-and-dirty presidential campaign. (The President will remain presidential, concerned only with matters of office; he will not descend into the pit…The President will descend but only... you see it's a formula that holds up everywhere.) The polls tell us that the economy, health care, and jobs are what most "concern" Americans. As well they should. Figures on the war in Iraq, while dropping, have remained relatively high for the president. ("For the first time since the United States invaded Iraq a year ago," reports Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor considering the latest polls, "the nation is evenly divided over the war.")
But I think this is deceptive. The truth is that the ragtag insurgency, the missing WMD, and assorted other problems in Iraq as well as the steady drip of American casualties -- or rather the inability to shut it all down there, to deliver the Iraq promised to the American people -- has driven this administration before it (just as other administrations were once driven by the unending war in Vietnam). Issue by issue, the traffic jam in Washington can be traced right back to that.
So let me now give you just a glimpse of some of the scandals and investigations piling up which threaten to boil over in the coming months
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http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1263
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DRM
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