Scandals of the Bush Era

I can't keep track. Valerie Plame. Abu Ghraib. Special Rendition. Torture. The Social Security bamboozlement. Katrina. Abramoff. Cunningham. Halliburton. The California energy scam. Another five or six corporate scandals. Mission Accomplished! Bring it 'on! Mushroom Clouds!

I need a bullentin board! I have one out in the storage room that I'll probably spend an hour trying to dig out tomorrow but it'll be worth it. My computer screen is simply too small for the Bush era. I've got the perfect place for the bullentin board; my office is sort of L shaped because part of the L is made by bookcases; I've got this nice big blank space to my left on the back of a bookcase where I can hang the bullentin board. I can keep track of the Bush era out of the corner of my left eye.

I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this. "Bush blunders of the week?" "Republican scandals of the month?" "Ten fiascos that will take at least ten years to fix?" I'll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, I just looked up Valerie Plame; now that's a story that's far from finished. Jason Leopold has two recent posts; here's the first about e-mails:

The White House confirmed Tuesday that it recently turned over to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald 250 pages of emails from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney related to covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. The emails were not submitted three years ago when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered White House staffers to turn over all documents that contained any reference to Valerie and Joseph Wilson.

Three years to submit e-mails? Talk about stonewalling. Here's the other post by Jason Leopold and this one mentions Bob Woodward:

In mid-June 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticism against the White House's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence started to make national headlines, Vice President Dick Cheney told his former chief of staff and close confidant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified intelligence data on Iraq's nuclear ambitions to a legendary Washington journalist in order to undercut the charges made against the Bush administration by the former ambassador.

On June 27, 2003, Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, became the first journalist to whom Libby leaked a portion of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that purportedly showed how Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

I suppose 'mentions' isn't quite the right word but the word came to mind probably because Woodward failed to 'mention' for some two years his involvement in the case while commenting on others and minimizing the whole CIA affair in the first place.

But what part of the National Intelligence Estimate did Libby show Woodward? Did Cheney, through Libby, try to pass off the forged Niger/Iraq documents to poor unsuspecting Mr. Woodward? If he did, then be sure to read Eriposte of The Left Coaster who has analyzed and written extensively of the Niger/Iraq documents. This story still has long legs. The president of the United States, with his ideological blinders rigidly locked in place, and his ears stuffed with cotton, lied his way into a war we didn't need and slowly, bit by bit, the facts are coming out.

My wife and I are going on vacation next week. I hope before we leave that I can get one of those lists going about some of the goings-on in an era that's going to take a long time to understand. No promises though. One thing I'm learning about blogging is that there's just not enough time for all of my good intentions. All one can do is mutter to oneself and say: onward!