Virtually no daylight between Democrats and Republicans

booman expresses his serious frustration with democratic inaction on phase II of the pre-war intelligence investigation... remember that...? i had quite honestly forgotten...

Remember when Harry Reid was Minority Leader and he used some procedural move to shut-down the Senate until the Republicans would agree to move forward with Phase II investigation over pre-war intelligence? How's that Phase II investigation going now that Harry Reid controls the Senate?

Still, another Intelligence panel Democrat, Dianne Feinstein of California, said the status of the Phase II investigation was a “good question.” Feinstein said she has not “been at a meeting where it’s come up. But I can’t make every meeting.”

[Intelligence Chairman Jay] Rockefeller said last week that the investigation is “chugging along very nicely,” but quietly, “without pyrotechnics,” a reference to the fights of recent years.

Not so, said Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the top Republican on the Intelligence panel. “They haven’t scheduled any time on it,” he said.

The Phase II investigation is supposed to focus on two things: "examining the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and...contrasting the statements of public officials with what the intelligence community was saying at the time."

The Democrats' excuse is that they are working on more pressing matters, like the FISA bill...which they passed out of committee last week with retroactive immunity for the telecommunications corporations.

The FISA bill is important, but not nearly as important as holding the criminals that got us into this catastrophic war accountable. The Dems are more concerned with covering the ass of the Establishment than they are with getting us out of this war.

i got chewed out royally last january by a woman friend of mine who does serious legwork for the dems in a rural county... i was expressing dismay that the new democratic congress wasn't picking up the ball in nearly the way i had hoped... she hit the ceiling and told me i was being unreasonable, that i needed to give them some time, that they had a strong "first 100 days" agenda and that they were getting things in place to make sure it all happened...

my expectation, which i now see to have been pure fantasy, was that a dem congress would take serious, forceful steps to remedy a downhill luge run to an authoritarian state... i was heartened when the investigations under waxman, conyers and leahy got rolling, although i still couldn't understand why, with clearly impeachable offenses just sitting out there beckoning, we weren't taking that step... then came the white house and doj stonewalling of congressional committee requests, followed by the subpoenas, followed by more stonewalling... and now...? crickets chirping...

the inaction on phase II is part and parcel of the whole pattern that's emerged, the truly horrifying part of which is that there's virtually no daylight between the dems and the r's... is the 2008 election, a democratic president and a stronger democratic presence in congress going to remedy this...? color me highly dubious...

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