Text 13649, 122 rader
Skriven 2005-06-19 20:14:59 av Ed Hulett (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 13643 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Impeachment
===================
Jeff Binkley -> All wrote:
 JB> Excellent.  I hope they keep talking like this.  I also see the number
 JB> 100,000 is stil around from The Clinto days.

 JB> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
 JB> dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601570_pf.html

 JB> Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War

 JB> By Dana Milbank
 JB> Post
 JB> Friday, June 17, 2005; A06



 JB> In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a
 JB> trip to the land of make-believe.

 JB> They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee
 JB> hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look
 JB> like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags
 JB> to make the whole thing look official.

 JB> Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the
 JB> other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that
 JB> he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly
 JB> phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered."
 JB> The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more
 JB> Democrats came downstairs to play along.

 JB> The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck
 JB> would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied
 JB> to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo
 JB> on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun
 JB> equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that
 JB> he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.

 JB> "At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little
 JB> subpoena power." That brought the house down.

 JB> As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and
 JB> other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can
 JB> regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles
 JB> they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing
 JB> Street Memo" is important.

 JB> A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535
 JB> members of Congress, only one -- Conyers -- had mentioned the memo on
 JB> the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in
 JB> Conyers's session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such
 JB> events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

 JB> The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its
 JB> assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go
 JB> to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson
 JB> IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely
 JB> mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a
 JB> son in Iraq, said the memo "only confirms what I already suspected."

 JB> No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally
 JB> against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it "one of the
 JB> biggest scandals in the history of this country." Conyers said the memos
 JB> "establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses."
 JB> Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that "the time has come to get
 JB> out" of Iraq.

 JB> The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former
 JB> intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in
 JB> Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration
 JB> "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of
 JB> the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and
 JB> that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

 JB> "Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,"
 JB> McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of
 JB> Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."

 JB> Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering
 JB> whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked
 JB> McGovern for his "candid answer."

 JB> At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing
 JB> on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -
 JB> - that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and
 JB> that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has
 JB> been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

 JB> The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush
 JB> lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you
 JB> like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster
 JB> of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."

 JB> Conyers's firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-
 JB> for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the
 JB> audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in
 JB> the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a
 JB> witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic
 JB> headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing
 JB> the activists to groan and one to shout "Conspiracy!"

 JB> The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction
 JB> from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush
 JB> White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is "the
 JB> equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon
 JB> White House."

 JB> Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then -- though
 JB> Conyers was not deterred. "We have a lot of work to do as a result of
 JB> this first panel," he told his colleagues. " 'Tis the beginning of our
 JB> work."

The local news had a short report about Conyers' little farce (of course, they
treated it as serious) and just about fell out of my chair when they showed a
short clip of the idiot playing "Mr. Chairman."

Only the fringe left-wing nut cases think the "Downing Street Memo" is evidence
that Bush tried to "fix" the case against Saddam.

Ed

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