Today's Frank Rich is remarkable in that it is a nutshell of almost all the lies around Iraq and Plamegate rolled up in a few paragraphs. He makes two big points: A, It Ain't Over, and B, well more on the flip....
TO believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took "responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."
He calls them what they are,
Liars. They don't spin, they lie. You have to understand that they will likely never have to face that fact because there is little to stop them or hold them accountable. They can say that there are 100 highly trained Iraqi troops and no one says a thing to them.Certainly not our Press. Hell they can lie outright and there will be at least three cable anchors defending them. The mystery is how much did they lie? How far did this go?
There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.
[Diary edited due to copyright considerations. Please only copy and paste VERY limited amounts of copyrighted materials, especially for-pay content.]