BushWorld: An Assault On Your Intelligence

From terrorism to economics to global warming to the globalization of pro-US "Democratic" voting systems, George W. Bush's administration has become a non-stop war on our own much-battered intelligences. Like many others, I have written about this many times before. And yet it seems like all the arguments are going around and around and around and still getting us nowhere.

For example, reading through Smirky's today. Rosa Brooks of the LA Times reveals (again) the war on terror's dirty little secret:

Terrorism is here to stay, though our leaders don't like to admit it. That's because terrorism is a method, not a movement.

Well, d'oh! The press sure missed that one, didn't they? Or more pure frustration from Milton Bass of the Berkshire Eagle

The situation is so ironic, so utterly beyond reasonable comprehension that the Democrats are unable to present a reasonable alternative to the political situation... There are so many absurdities connected to the administration of George W. Bush that you wouldn't believe them if they were presented in a novel or movie plot. The only possible reaction of a rational person is banging one's head against a wall or sitting back and letting the world go by...

Then over to Josh Marshall, who points out (again) that the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Pat Roberts (R) of Kansas, is a hack, a shame to his office, who has turned the Intel Committee into an arm of Karl Rove's political operation:

Note that there are no congressional investigations into the origin of the Niger forgeries, the outing of Valerie Plame, and countless other scandals and mysteries large and small. (Remember, after the 2004 election, Roberts announced that there's now not enough time for the investigation into possible political manipulation of Iraqi WMD intel, which he promised prior to the election.)

But now there will be congressional hearings into whether the CIA does a good enough job at protecting the 'cover' of its agents in its Directorate of Operations...

Those who are so Bush-true as to hypothesize that the CIA made a knowingly fraudulent referral would have to contend with the fact that the Bush Justice Department and then later Patrick Fitzgerald both concluded that the referral was a valid one.

The only other possibility -- one which I've referred to jokingly in the past -- is to argue that she wasn't covert enough. That is to say, maybe she was covert to the CIA. But she really wasn't covert up to the standards of say, Bill Safire or Tucker Carlson or Bill O'Reilly.

And this, understand, is the premise of the new Roberts' hearings. Was she really covert enough? ...

The only reason Chairman Roberts now wants hearings into this question is that it might generate more fodder for excuse-making for those who will climb any mountain and ford any stream to avoid holding any of the president's lieutenants to account.

Rove knows that control of both the Senate and the House, plus a compliant press, gives him the perfect noise-making machine.