Underusing Oversight

[Guest Gandalf Grey]

Underusing Oversight

 

By Brady Bonk

Created Jul 14 2007 - 11:05am

 

Howard and the gang were on week two of their summer break, so it was radio

oatmeal for my brain this week: C-Span's Washington Journal. I was groggy,

so I am not sure if it was Brian Lamb himself who said it, but it certainly

did get me out of bed, when he said regarding Iraq that it's best if we not

focus on how we got here but instead figure out what to do now.

 

This conventional wisdom is a fly in the ointment that has contributed

mightily to Pelosi Congress I's palsy on the subject of Iraq. Focusing on

how we got here is precisely what Congress should have been doing from day

one; it should be the long-term overriding mission of the Democrats. There

should be hearing after hearing on the subject, the sun over K Street should

be blotted out with subpoenas soaring through the air, and it should have

been so immediately following the Speaker's public relations blitz known as

the 100 hours.

 

While prevailing conventional wisdom is persuading more congressmen toward

ending or curtailing the American occupation of Iraq, it still doesn't get

it right. As Scott Ritter slyly noted recently, it's not that a majority of

Americans have gone anti-war. It's that they don't like to lose.

 

With that mindset, Democrats focused their get-out efforts on military

spending bills that had slim mathematical prospects of passage. They didn't

have the votes. They didn't win enough seats to have the votes. In the

Senate, they had one dedicated DINO and one true Democrat with a pesky

cerebral arteriovenous malformation, which left the Senate ice cold and the

House lukewarm. Trying to legislate the curent president out of this

occupation was showing up to a gunfight with a whoopie cushion. Meanwhile,

they've had a bunker-buster in the basement and have so far barely gotten it

out to wash and wax it-Oversight.

 

They have certainly unleashed oversight on other targets. Congressional

hearings have left Alboo Gonzoo, the Attorney General to the President of

the United States, as a fallen Saddam statue himself, nearly fully dragging

on the ground. They also forced a former DOJ official to actually admit that

the "caging" was used in an official capacity. Every hearing held on every

subject has seemed to reveal some profoundly jaw-dropping headline. And,

bear in mind, it was hearings, not legislation, that forced a corrupt

president to resign when I was but a pup. My Grandma had the hearings on the

TV day after day after day, so regularly that I assumed they were just

another soap opera.

 

That should have been this Congress' focus, not legislation. Get these

assholes in front of committees and cameras. Inquire. Subpoena. Make them

say "I don't remember" a thousand times. Force them to consider risking

contempt. Show the American public, day after day after day, what a bunch of

lying, thieving, incompetent, stupid bastards led us into this ridiculous,

far too costly occupation of Iraq. Grab headlines. Uncover every dirty

little nasty truth about Iraq that you can, and then run on it in 2008 and

beyond, use it to cement a truly veto-proof majority. THEN's when you get to

vote to end it.

 

There is another larger purpose that this Congress should have more

vigorously emphasized oversight than it has, and why Mr. Lamb, at least I

think it was Mr. Lamb, was so incredibly mistaken in chanting the prevailing

conventional wisdom: Determining how we got here is essential if even the

semblance of democracy is to be saved in these Untied States. Congress must

determine why and how Congress allowed itself to be led around by the nose

ring by a rogue White House. It must act now to reassert its power for the

next time we get a cowboy executive. We need a War Powers Act 2007, and it

needs to have not just teeth, but fangs. This can only come about by

blasting sunshine on this Dirty Big War, and by coming to a more honest

conventional wisdom, that what's wrong with Iraq wasn't the mission's

execution, but that we even undertook it in the first place.

 

Thank goodness Howard Stern returns live on Monday. Baba booey to ya'll.

_______

 

 

 

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson