Gossip, Snark, and Satire Dedicated to Liberty Patriots Fighting for America's Most Glorious Future

A general public consensus has grown around the notion that the Bush Administration broke laws, manipulated the Constitution, abused executive privilege, and lied to the American people in order to gain public support for its own misguided policy initiatives.

From ordering the NSA to spy on American citizens, to authorizing torture (and then denying it), Bush and his cronies have done some pretty bad shit. Thankfully, with the shift of political winds, it’s currently looking like they might not get away with it.

According to one Democratic senator, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been discussing the possibility of holding major hearings to examine the activities of the Bush Administration.

The form and scope of such hearings have yet to be determined, but this senator, and member of the Senate Judicial Committee, is pressing for something along the lines of Church-Pike–a bicameral endeavor that would address the full range of executive misdeeds.

The Democratic leadership, however, is apparently leaning towards a more limited inquiry–something that would focus on two or three specific issues.  Dem leaders have an understandable concern about public opinion determining they should be more focused on current economic problems, rather than using their legislative hours to reveal the truth about our collective history.

For the sake of our historical record, there should be a full accounting of the Bush administration. We need the final report conclusively detailing how they manipulated the intelligence community to boost public support for invading Iraq, we need to understand how they undermined democracy in the name of promoting it. If I get into listing all the things the American public needs to understand about the Bush administration’s less savory activities, this post would turn into a book. The point is we need an honest and full accounting in order to (hopefully) prevent this kind of thing from happening again, and to forestall ongoing GOP attempts to re-cast the Bush legacy as one representing some kind of noble promotion of democracy worldwide.

Perhaps the appointment of an independent prosecutor–say, one Patrick Fitzgerald–would allow Congress to stay focused on its legislative activities, while still producing a full report on everything that went wrong over the past eight years. As much as I believe Bush and his advisers need to be held to account, even I don’t relish the idea of week-after-week of live C-SPAN broadcasting the vehement soapboxing of members of Congress eager to lodge their newly-energized approbrium on the record.