Electric Monkey Pants

Pat Roberts has a difficult job; he has to do exactly nothing while making it look like he’s working hard. Right now it looks like he’s got the “do nothing” part down, but he’s not very adept at making it look like he’s working:

When angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate last year to protest the slow pace of a congressional investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) claimed a rare victory.

Republicans called it a stunt but promised to quickly wrap up the inquiry. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is overseeing the investigation, said his report was near completion and there was no need for the fuss.

That was nine months ago.

The Republican-led committee, which agreed in February 2004 to write the report, has yet to complete its work. Just two of five planned sections of the committee’s findings are fully drafted and ready to be voted on by members, according to Democratic and Republican staffers. Committee sources involved with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they are working hard to complete it. But disputing Roberts, they said they had started almost from scratch in November after Democrats staged their protest.

That’s funny. Before the Democrats protested he hadn’t done jack shit! Now 2 sections are done, but I’m betting that the 2 sections completed are the most harmless. Any sort of competent or thorough investigation would reveal far more than Roberts is prepared to show us. He’s a cover-up guy. This is a cover-up. At most he will put a few mildly damaging bits in there to make it seem like he has teeth. He’s a naked partisan, sucking at Cheney’s wrinkled, wart-filled little cock with his toothless mouth.

The Republicans cannot be trusted to investigate themselves.

Part of the investigation that focuses on the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was run by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, is on hold, staff members said, pending a separate inquiry by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

Feith is the guy charged with justifying the invasion of Iraq by the neocons. He did his job and he did it well. Now they will go to great lengths to provide cover for him. They will lie, obstruct, assassinate, and stall to make sure the public doesn’t learn what really went on in Feith’s dungeon.

This is all part of a complex political dance, most of it designed to lull the public to sleep and assure us that we have a responsive and non-criminal government when the reverse is actually true.

Everybody knows that our excuses for the Iraq War were manufactured in the Office of Special Plans. Everybody knows those excuses were bullshit, there were no WMDs (except the ones we gave Saddam) and Iraq was not a threat to us (just as Iran is not a real threat). That doesn’t matter. Nobody has the political will or power to take on the Bush administration and start throwing people in jail. Until the likely-to-be-fraudulent elections in November we don’t have a prayer of seeing real action on this investigation. Only if the neocons don’t manage to successfully rig the election will we see action. Let’s hope they fuck up and don’t stuff enough ballot boxes.

At this rate it looks like they will have to stuff a lot of ballot boxes.