Thursday, May 10, 2018

The Constitution is lying on the Capitol floor and it won't get up again

Gina Haspel doesn't belong in the leadership of the CIA, she belongs in a cell at the Hague.  I will recommend, of course, that you read what the estimable Charles Pierce had to say about the public part of the Senate Committee pantomime of a confirmation hearing yesterday, he could have gone into a lot more detail but what he gives is certainly sufficient for refusing to recommend her for the position.   But that won't happen and not because it's rumored that Trump would put up someone worse, next, Tom Cotton of Arkansas.   But that's not why I'm writing this.

Under mostly the Republicans but not only Republicans the legendary role of the congress in balancing the executive and judiciary branches of government has become a fraud.   That's been going on a long time as the hearings process has become increasingly politicized under the glare of television and radio and internet coverage and as cowardly and corrupt politicians have allowed those testifying to get away with issuing streams of meaningless words instead of answering questions.  Gina Haspel did that over and over again, as Senators pointed out she wasn't answering questions she continued to not answer their questions arrogantly aware that the heads of the Committee and the Senate leadership and, ultimately, the Senators weren't going to make her answer their questions.  It's disgusting that any of them would have so little respect for their positions and the Constitution they allegedly support and defend that they have allowed this to go on for decades.  And it's gotten far worse under the Trump regime when his thugs have flatly refused to answer questions without any legal excuse for not answering them with "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

I fail to understand how, if you're going to pretend that taking an oath makes you any more required to tell the truth, Gina Haspel and the rest of them aren't in some kind of legal breach of the oath they take, not to mention whatever oaths they might also take to uphold the law and Constitution, not to mention the Senators and House members being in a direct violation of their oaths of office. 

The war criminal Oliver North has taken over the leadership of Murder inc otherwise known as the NRA , a guy who got away with both murder and perjury in front of a Senate committee.   I'd say that it wasn't a more appropriate week for that to happen than the one in which Gina Haspel is going to get away with what she's done, both her role in torturing people, covering up the torture of people and her perjurious testimony of yesterday but these days in Washington, DC, just about any other week when there are hearings would be as appropriate.   I think the exchange I heard in which she refused to say to Senator Kamala Harris that she would recuse herself as the one who gets to decide what in her record is classified and held in secret, an obvious and blatant conflict of interest was about the worst I've heard.  The arrogance of that answer should have been enough to lose anyone the nomination but it won't because our Constitution is lying on the Capitol floor and it won't get up again.  Don't bother calling Life Alert, call the coroner before it decays anymore.

1 comment:

  1. Oaths only work that way when we want them to; otherwise they don't. Oaths are very convenient that way.

    Actually, I think of them rather the way I think of the 19th century idea of "God" as being necessary to keep the rabble in line, but otherwise discardable (and interesting how much decent reporting on non-evangelical Christians is starting to be common at Daily Beast and Vox. But I digress.....). The oath pretty much functions that way: an idea we publicly swear fealty to, privately laugh about as completely useless and as dead as the dodo. After all, if you lie to the FBI, you're in trouble even though you didn't answer their questions "under oath." Well, you're in trouble if they want you to be; otherwise, you aren't.

    Back to that matter of how oaths are enforced, which is pretty much how everything criminal is enforced.....or not.

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