Mother Jones on Bush's Scandals

Justice a l'Orange (from Tom Engelhardt at Mother Jones):

The Bush administration has been in trouble ever since its arrogance met its incompetence at Intelligence Pass last summer; ever since Plame Gate began (see below), ever since George's guys tried to solve their problems -- all those already nagging lies and exaggerations, all the fun and games that panicked a country into war -- by throwing CIA director George Tenet to the sharks, and he refused to walk the plank.

Ever since then, they've been gathering angry constituencies -- in the military, in the 'intelligence community,' in Congress, in the bureaucracy, in the media, even on the right -- and trailing behind them an ever growing gaggle of barely suppressed scandals, investigative committees, nosy commissions, grand juries, and intra-bureaucratic buck-passing. Their pattern -- not completely unfamiliar, if you think back to previous administrations -- has been to mount the barricades, declare, 'Thus far, and no farther; they shall not pass,' and then, when the weather gets heavy, fall back to the next set of barricades.

The attorney general will not recuse himself; no special prosecutor will be appointed . . . You complete that one. The president will not testify; the president will testify but only before one or two people and not under oath . . . and so forth. If you watched carefully, you would see the administration slowly and quietly giving ground for some time on issue after issue, problem after problem, a sign of weakness -- and an explanation, in part, for the sudden loss of media docility. (The pack smells blood.)

Recently, the pace has been upped. We're already in the midst of an early, down-and-dirty presidential campaign. (The President will remain presidential, concerned only with matters of office; he will not descend into the pit. The President will descend but only... you see it's a formula that holds up everywhere.) The polls tell us that the economy, health care, and jobs are what most "concern" Americans. As well they should. Figures on the war in Iraq, while dropping, have remained relatively high for the president. ("For the first time since the United States invaded Iraq a year ago," reports Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor considering the latest polls, "the nation is evenly divided over the war.")

But I think this is deceptive. The truth is that the ragtag insurgency, the missing WMD, and assorted other problems in Iraq as well as the steady drip of American casualties -- or rather the inability to shut it all down there, to deliver the Iraq promised to the American people -- has driven this administration before it (just as other administrations were once driven by the unending war in Vietnam). Issue by issue, the traffic jam in Washington can be traced right back to that.

Then Mr. Engelhardt summarizes the various scandals that are bubbling just under the surface:

Plame Gate: indictments are coming soon

Blaming the CIA etc. for 'intelligence failures' in the run-up to the Iraq war--when it was the White House exagerating the threat and relying on the corrupt Iraqi exile community for post-war planning

9/11 commission: will it ever conclude anything?

Cheney/Halliburton, 'unvarnished' secret advice from big oil companies, etc.(and Cheney's chummy relationship with Supreme Court Justice Scalia)

Mr. Bush's chickenhawk Vietnam War service

A grand jury investigating the Niger uranium phony documents

A grand jury invesitigating allegations of Halliburton's Cheney era bribes to Nigerian officials

See the links to all these stories on the Mother Jones site. It's only a matter of time until some of this really hits the fan. My humble prediction: Mr. Bush will not be re-elected.