From AP via Yahoo! News "Bush warns Dems to take offer in firings":
A defiant President Bush warned Democrats Tuesday to accept his offer to have top aides testify about the firings of federal prosecutors only privately and not under oath or risk a constitutional showdown from which he would not back down.
Is it back on the table now, Speaker Pelosi?
Today's Sturm und Drang...err...press conference, was one long, putrid diatribe against everything the American governmental system has held dear for over 200 years, delivered in a half Tony Soprano, half Scarface tone that I would hope finally, finally convinces Dems that there is simply nothing else to be done but to drive this administration from power.
The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.
"If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed," Bush said. "If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see."
Yeah, of course it's "unprecedented": it's unprecedented that a US President would suggest unsworn testimony in a closed session with no transcript somehow would qualify as truthful, trustworthy government of, by and for the People. I thought I had seen everything from this bullbleep spewing, Orwellian administration but this line takes it to a new level of perversion: the lie is the truth!
"If the staff of a president operated in constant fear of being hauled before various committees to discuss internal deliberations, the president would not receive candid advice and the American people would be ill-served," he said.
Ah, President Fear gets to the rub of it: the utter, cockroach-like terror this administration has of doing anything in the light. What "candid advice" are you afraid of somebody being "hauled in" to devulge under oath, Mr. B*sh? The kind that says you can lie a nation into war? The kind that says you can plunder the treasury for your family and friends while Americans literally die in the streets of their own cities and the battlefields of the world? The kind that says you can defy any and every law and treaty because you're the President? Are you afraid of the "Ted Haggard" moment that would finally unmask you to even your most deluded followers as a complete stain upon the Republic? Afraid once you're so unmasked you might end up out of office and in the slammer as punishment for your crimes (you've already admitted to over 30 felony violations of the FISA Act, remember)? Or maybe even a worse penalty? You know, the Carla Faye Tucker treatment? Hmmm? Gee, how your born-again but desperately afraid little soul must be fearing the Divine Justice of a little twist of fate like that ...because you know your God is a wrathful God; just ask Pastor Hagee.
It's gotta' be something big if you're willing to bring about a Constitutional crisis over it.
Now that it looks like the administration has finally gone too far for even the corpulent Beltway elites I look forward to Speaker Pelosi making the following statement: "if the administration refuses to heed our subpoenas we will initiate Articles of Impeachment with the charges of Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Justice".