This is where our media, our politics, hell our democracy has failed in the past few years, as the administration has moved from one travesty to another, without accountability.
In yet another accountability moment, the top Pentagon investigator has resigned amid accusations that he stonewalled inquiries into senior Bush administration officials suspected of wrongdoing.
(more below the fold)
And yes, he is...
planning to take a job with the parent company of Blackwater USA, a defense contractor.
.
While he is accused of
fabricating an official Pentagon news release, planning an expensive junket to Germany and hiding information from Congress. Schmitz is the senior Pentagon official charged with investigating waste, fraud and abuse.
Yesterday in Rep. Brad Miller's diary, I had listed the following accountability failures in the last four years:
- 9/11
- not neutralizing Bin Laden and Zawahiri 4 years after 9/11
- allowing Al Qaeda terrorist bases to proliferate in our "ally" Pakistan's territory
- allowing the Taliban to reform inside Pakistan and start killing American soldiers in Afghanistan
- the false WMD story
- not shutting down the AQ Khan nuclear network - the real WMD story
- the false Saddam-Al Qaeda story
- the Iraq quagmire
- the increasing influence of Iran in Iraq
- the turning of the Sunni triangle into a jehadi university
From other comments on the diary, we can add
- allowing the North Korea situation to fester so that they have been able to build maybe several more nukes.
- outing of Plame
Can we safely say that each one of these is far more significant for America than Monica Lewinsky and the cigar were?
Of course now we add the Hurricane Katrina response to the above list.
I have seen a lot of comments on dkos about how there are so many clusterf---s that this administration has created, that its hard to focus on them and the media's and the public's attention is always diffused as a result.
Someone (maybe even a section of dkos, or as a related web site) needs to categorize and list all of these accountability gaps, and link to publicly available information on them.
Without such a single portal, one can simply not comprehend the utter incompetence of the administration, besides documenting the monumental evidence of the incompetence.
Or is there already such a web site?