1 Boring Old Man

Congress girds up for return to oversight
Probes include alleged contracting abuses in Iraq and the alteration of scientific findings.

>Not since the Depression-era Congress of 1932 has Capitol Hill ramped up so quickly for oversight hearings and related legislation – most targeting the Bush administration.

Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are hiring more lawyers, and watchdog groups say they are swamped with calls from committee staff asking for advice on pursuing the nearly lost art of congressional investigation.

In its first 100 days, the new Congress launched probes on allegations ranging from contracting abuses in Iraq and the alteration of scientific findings to the misuse of federal resources for partisan purposes. Some hearings, such as those on last year’s firing of eight US attorneys, were snatched from the headlines; others are longer-term campaigns to try to uncover any government waste and to expand the public’s access to how government conducts its business.

"There’s a whole culture of effective oversight, which the Congress carried out in the 1970s up through the early 1990s, that has been very much lost, and there’s a lot of effort now going on to rebuild oversight skills," says Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and a former deputy House counsel.

I’m tired of just going after them for bad judgement, or idelogical decisions, or just general slime. I’m ready for criminal prosecution. The biggest is Niger. That was a known, conscious lie. The Office of Special Plans – Feith leaked a top secret memo on purpose to William Kristol’s Weekly Standard. And the Justice Department, how many laws can one small group break in a short time?

We owe it to our children and their children to make sure this never happens again. This is not a gallery to be proud of. We let it slide after Nixon, and look where it’s crept back to, little by little.

This is not about "the Democrats are in power, let’s get the Republicans." It’s not even about the Liberals now get to redo some of what the Conservatives have undone of what the Liberals did last time. That would be business as usual. This is about a criminal attempt to fundamentally alter our government to fit an ideology held by precious few – a secret ideology. This is about publicly saying one thing, and privately doing another. It’s about people who we commonly call "crooks" – crooks that have taken over the very Agencies we have to deal with "crooks." So there’s nothing about what’s happening now that’s in the realm of the normal ebb and flow of American politics.

These people think they are "special." And they are very, very "special." Let’s give them all the attention they deserve…