perfidy

According to the Washington Post, the White House has decided that it will no longer respond to questions about government finances from members of Congress who aren't Republicans. Of course, what they say is that they'll only respond to committee chairs, but since all the chairs are Republican, it's the same thing, right?

Last time I checked, the chairs of committees didn't carry any more legal authority into Congress (voting support) than any other member of Congress. This whole committee business is something that has to change. When you have half the Senate controlled by one party and half by the other, the chairmanships ought to be split equally.

Why does this Administration fight releasing information at every turn? Why are Cheney's conversations about energy still secret? Are there truly so many necessary secrets?

There aren't. Just as we've seen the Patriot Act being abused to prosecute crimes unrelated to terrorism, we're now seeing executive powers abused. These people aren't interested in what's right. They're interested in what they're legally able to get away with. And truly, that is why they emphasize the rule of law at every opportunity. You see, what they're doing is legal.

It's extremely useful to place all this in context. We had a tempest in a teapot last week, with RepubliFoxNews shouting to all who would listen (in other words, the people that already agree with them) that the democrats were "politicizing the intelligence process". This was continuously repeated all around the blogosphere as well. Doesn't it make sense to go to the memo itself, read it ourselves, and judge?

Look at the opener on that story: "Following is the text of a memo written by a Democrat on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that suggests how to make the greatest gain off of intelligence data leading to the war against Iraq. The memo was obtained by Fox News".

Talk about leading the reader around by the nose. Don't bother reading it, they're telling you. We've already done that for you!

This memo is a tactical one. It's trying to figure out how to get an investigation of intelligence matter started, because they're being stonewalled in every other way. And, as I pointed out earlier, the White House is becoming substantially less cooperative vis-a-vis elected representatives. These committees are fundamentally political entities. If they weren't, the chairmen would listen to requests made by all committee members, rather than only those made by his party.

All in all this points to the following: The White House views our elected representatives as nothing more than speed bumps on the road to "getting it done", whatever it is. We sure as hell can't count on anything they've said so far to understand what they're doing.

It's just another pile of steaming crap, fresh out of the GOP's "The Earth is Flat" Playbook. Yeah -- the earth is being flattened. And by the time they're through with it, it'll be scorched too. But it won't matter to Bush and Corporation -- they'll be safe in their gated communities, paying less in taxes than the workers whose jobs they are vigorously sending overseas, in the name of "productivity", or shareholder value, or whatever BS line they're delivering this week.

Get this straight: Increasing shareholder value only helps if you're a shareholder. With the massive decline in the economy overall, I suspect that the average citizen in this country will be returning to historical investment positions. Most of the time that means he really won't have any. And that's just fine with the ruling majority, who'll continue to suck the lifeblood out of that guy's family and finances with regressive taxes needed to give the very richest among us a massive tax cut, use his money to pay for a war he doesn't give a shit about, and hand the bill to his children, while shielding their own children by eliminating the estate tax.

I love a good conspiracy theory.