Get Ready For Action

With the exception of the line "stopping the war will have to wait" I have to wholeheartedly endorse this Michael Tomasky article.

Whenever I hear a Democrat in Congress say something like, "We're not interested in the past; we're focused on the future," I shoot the nearest television. What this usually means is: "Our pollsters tell us that voters don't remember what happened last week, let alone three or four years ago, and that we just open ourselves up to attack for 'dwelling in the past.'"

This is exactly the kind of politics that lost them the last two very winnable presidential elections. Follow your polls, stay on safe ground, concede the other side's arguments before they've even made them; and for God's sakes, don't ever try to move public opinion, just try to meet it and placate it.

If they don't know by now how much this posture has cost them politically in the last seven years -- and how much it's cost the country in countless ways -- then majority status will be fundamentally wasted on them.

This is incredibly correct. We have one chance to get this right, or the same people that lied us into war and ran the White House like a criminal enterprise will rise again, years and years later, in an even worse incarnation. The American people have been lied to, repeatedly and totally. They need to know exactly how and why for a very simple reason: so that safeguards can be instituted to ensure something like this never happens again. Nobody thought there could be anything like Nixon after Nixon. They were right: it's worse.

Andrew Sullivan, who I don't quote often, writes here with great energy and vigor:

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president's office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about - what it has always been about - is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won't cooperate, consider impeaching him.

We cannot let a mechanism stay in place where the executive branch can manipulate intelligence, lie to everyone, create their own reality and send Americans off to die. This has been coming to a head for a long time and it has to stop. I'm glad that there is a new commission looking into the division of war powers. Indeed, there's a long-dormant War Powers Act that Congress seems averse to use. But this is a crisis point. The way in which the legislative branch has given up all foreign policy decision-making is appalling and has left us at the whim of a single executive. This doesn't work. There's too much power invested in one branch. And holding them accountable for their sins will go a long way to future Presidents not wanting to repeat the action.