The Trifecta The Bush White House Fears Most

It was beginning to seem as if the CIA leak investigation and the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was going the way of the Downing Street Minutes, that is out of the main stream media entirely.  But then Senate Democrats unexpectedly pulled their heads out of the sand and pulled a new trick out of the bag.  Harry Reid called for a closed session of the Senate Tuesday to discuss the indictments and pre-war intelligence, a move that caught Senate Republicans off guard and brought media attention back to the issue.  The Senate chamber was cleared of all reporters and staff, leaving only the Senators to fight it out behind closed doors for a little over two hours.  Who wouldn’t give their right arm to have been a fly on that wall?

For the past two years there have been multiple investigations looking into all aspects of the Iraq war and three in particular seem to be coming to a head and intersecting in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.  First there is the CIA leak investigation that has already resulted in a five-count indictment of the Vice President’s Chief of Staff and is still not wrapped up, leaving the possibility of further indictments casting a dark cloud over the White House.  Second is the FBI investigation into the forged documents that lead to the 16 words in Bush’s State of the Union address and now appear to have originated in Bush’s buddy Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s intelligence agency Sismi, of course Bush and Berlusconi both denied this when asked by reporters after their meeting on Monday.  The third is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into pre-war intelligence that had been stalled until today, when Senate Democrats decided to toss some fuel on the fire to get it going again.  

Since the indictments were handed up on Friday, there has been a non-stop parade of Bush apologists on television proclaiming victory because no one was indicted on the charge of outing a CIA agent.  They have also been quick to point out that this is not Watergate.  This so called victory will be short lived, but I do agree with them on their second point.  This scandal is, as John Dean put it, “Worse than Watergate”.  This is well on the road to making Watergate pale in comparison and will (if it all comes out) bury Nixon’s shenanigans in the history books for the third rate burglary that it was, and Treasongate will become the benchmark against which all future scandals will be measured.  We all know that Bush is the worst President ever, but if the Democrats play their cards right, the history books will confirm this and our grandchildren will learn it as fact in our public schools, right along with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.  

I will not elevate Senate Democrats to heroes in this affair, as they are in many ways more culpable for our current predicament than the White House.  In the run up to the war, I remember hearing only the lone voice of Senator Robert Byrd expressing concern about the rationale for war and the lack of questioning by those with the sole constitutional authority to declare it.  Now it is save your ass time for Senate Democrats and still too many of them are unwilling to jump off the sinking ship, which in the end will be justice served.  They should go down as a result of their lack of courage to speak truth to power, their lack of concern for those they serve and their utter contempt for the very office they hold.

If we get any real answers as to why our young men and women were sent to die in Iraq and who in the Bush administration lied and manufactured intelligence to get us there, it will be purely accidental.  The Democrats in the Senate are looking out for themselves, if we the people benefit at all from their efforts, you can be sure that it will be of secondary importance to them.  

Bush and Cheney are not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot, and no amount of spin is going to make it so.  These three investigations are ongoing and picking up speed by the minute.  What started out as disparate inquiries are now culminating into the perfect storm that threatens to take this corrupt White House down and most likely will drag the criminal laden Republican leadership along as well.  The collateral damage will be great and many Democrats will be damaged as a result, but they have a lot to answer for in this whole unfolding story, a fact we should all remember when we are writing checks next summer and when we go to the polls next November.