Lots of words spilled about the Wyden town hall yesterday at Blue Oregon, where the editors have taken to calling dissenters a “lynchmob”, saying that their arguments are “crap”, and accusing them of “shrieking” and “screaming”.
Can you hear the shrillness, Kenneth?
What’s funny, given that commenters at BO are apparently unhappy about my picking on poor, poor Sen. Ron Wyden for saying he trusts the Bush administration (what else could he do?) is that whether he trusted them wasn’t even the question I went to ask.
What I was going to ask him was what — when a majority of the Democratic senators on the intelligence committee (including Wyden) and a majority of the senators on the armed services committee voted against the Iraq AUMF — could possibly have possessed 29 Democratic senators (including four of the current presidential candidates) to give authority to Bush to invade Iraq? I figured that after four years he must have talked to some of them. As a member of the intelligence committee he saw the best info that anyone in Congress could have seen, did he have any idea what (apparently false) evidence the other senators saw that could have caused them to make such a grave mistake?
But I didn’t get enough time to ask that. Maybe he wouldn’t have liked that question either.
One of my comments from the “screaming” post:
Over on the other thread, one of the posters mentioned Sen. Barry Goldwater and the Nixon impeachment. He (or she) had the timeline wrong, but here’s a snippet of an interview with Goldwater from TIME magazine in May 1973 (my emphasis):
Should President Nixon resign? If the President of the United States lied to the American people, then the question is: Can you trust him? Impeachment would come up. And this country is in too much trouble internationally to have such a gigantic demonstration of distrust in its leaders. I’m convinced he knew nothing at the inception [of the Watergate affair]. But the coverup?
If it can be proved that he lied, resignation would have to be considered.
It would be quick. Everything would be over, ended. It wouldn’t drag out like impeachment.
That was a member of the president’s own party, a year after the Watergate break-in, and a year before the impeachment hearings began in the House Judiciary committee.
“Can you trust him?” That was essentially my question to Sen. Wyden. Barry Goldwater could bring that up after what was in comparison a pretty small operation at the time (most of the abuse of power charges in the Nixon impeachment articles were uncovered after this interview). If the door to impeachment in the Senate is locked — even by people who vote the right way like Ron Wyden — there’s no impetus for the House to pursue it. Someone has to kick open the door by actively discussing the possibility that it could happen, if they’re actually open to the idea.
If they’re not, good luck to “getting us out of Iraq, fixing energy policy, fixing the health care system and correcting schools” while Bush and Cheney are in office. That just seems like a political fantasy to me.
I didn’t include this in yesterday’s post, but as I turned to leave, Wyden said that he was going to be working in September to beat back the FISA bill. I replied that Bush has already stated that he was going to push for further authority than he’d gotten last month. A bright-eyed young woman defended Wyden and told me that of course that’s what Bush would do. But that’s sort of my point. That is what Bush would do. You can expect the administration to cross the line at every opportunity. Trust and verify is fine when the subject has earned your trust. But the Bush administration has shown time and again that it is not trustworthy. At the very least it needs to be constrained.