The White House Scandals Just Keep Rolling On

I can't keep track anymore. If we include Congressional scandals on the Republican side with the growing number of White House scandals, it's hard to keep track of what's happening. It's all the media's fault, of course. If the media had been doing it's job from 2001 on, we could have dealt very easily with one scandal after another. Say one about every three months. That would be about twenty-five scandals by now. That's assuming the bums hadn't been voted out of office in 2002, or 2004 or 2006. Dealing with all these scandals at once is just plain hard work.

George W. Bush knows a lot about hard work. He tells us, after all, that being president is hard work. So hard that sometimes there just isn't time to do those pesky investigations that Bush keeps promising, such as determining who outed Valerie Plame Wilson and thereby ruined a CIA operation that dealt with the investigation of weapons of mass destruction, which happened to be what Mrs. Wilson was doing. Apparently it was too hard for Bush to do a proper internal investigation and see to it that those responsible were fired, if not prosecuted, or, at the very least, that people's security clearance was revoked. Think Progress has the story:

Dr. James Knodell, director of the Office of Security at the White House, revealed today that to his knowledge the White House has never ordered a probe, report, or sanctions as a result of the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. “I have no knowledge of any investigation in my office,” he said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said he was “shocked” by Knodell’s testimony, adding that the White House’s lack of action was a “breach on top of a breach.”

Knodell claimed the White House did not investigate because there was an outside investigation taking place. But Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted that the investigation “didn’t start until months and months later, and [only] had the purpose of narrowly looking to see whether there was a criminal law violated.” Waxman asked, “But there was an obligation for the White House to investigate whether classified information was being leaked inappropriately, wasn’t there?” Knodell answered, “If that was the case, yes.”

Hang on to your hats folks. After six years of looking the other way, there's a change in Washington. Now it takes time to gather the facts, but things are beginning to happen. With the Democrats in charge, Congress is no longer obliged to listen to Karl Rove's threats. We're going to hear a lot of temper tantrums from the White House but the days of rubber stamping whatever President Bush wants is over. We're going to learn a lot in the next few months.