For days, I’ve thought that the Larry Craig incident contains a message, one that has nothing really to do with some obscure Senator in a far away State being caught in a compromising situation in an Airport toilet. He was out of there like a blue streak, barely five days from exposure to resignation – even though he’s still claiming innocence. What that says to me is that ‘they’ know that they are an inch away from falling down like a brick. Their credibility is shot. They sat through scandal after scandal like they were made of stone, but now they know the jig is close to up. They’ve divested themselves of targets over the summer – Rove, Gonzales, the ‘bad boys’ at the DOJ, etc. ‘They’ know how close this thing is to crumbling.
And for days, I’ve been praying for a whistle blower. My thesis is this: The Republicans in the House and Senate, the Conservatives in the Electorate, the Religious Right preachers and pundits are all nervous about going down with the ship. They can’t just bolt. They can’t use anything that’s already been revealed as an excuse to change their tunes. They’ve already rationalized and defended what’s come before. But if something new comes along, something unconscionable, they would have a new reason to do the right [and face-saving] thing. I doubt that many of them have another round of defending Bush in them. So, I see the speed of the Larry Craig incident as a harbinger, a sign, of how close the Bush Administration is to the abyss.
One opportunity for a small "whistle" is on our doorstep. Colin Powell was used and abused in the buildup to the Iraq Invasion. I think he is a decent man who got caught up in something he now regrets. I don’t know if he’s as mad about that as he ought to be [I don’t even know if he gets mad]. But if he comes out of seclusion and starts talking now – telling the whole truth about his experience when he was in the same shoes as General Petraeus, he could do a lot for our country. All he would have to do is talk about the kind of pressure he was under in the lead-up to the U.N. speech [but it would also be nice if he were candid about his own interpretation of the facts about this war].
It’s not exactly whistle blowing. It’s more like truth telling…
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