The guy who gets away with it
At the center of the 1997 noir picture "L.A. Confidential," there's a character named Rollo Tomasi. Tomasi is not a real person, even within the fictional accounts of the film involving the Los Angeles Police Department of the 1950s. Det. Lt. Edmund Exley, played by Guy Pierce, is motivated to become a police officer because of Rollo Tomasi."Rollo was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty. And he shot my father six times and got away clean," Exley explains to Kevin Spacey's Jack Vincennes, "No one even knew who he was. I just made up the name to give him some personality... Rollo Tomasi is the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it."
President Bush is Rollo Tomasi, and he's going to get away with it. Bush has fewer than 8 months left in office, and the Democrats in Washington, many of them complicit in his crimes, seem content to cross off the remaining days on their calendar, and let this criminal president wander back to Crawford to finish out his days. Not even the public testimony of former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has spurred action.
In a soon-to-be-released book, McClellan asserts that Bush used "propaganda" and manipulated intelligence to sell the Iraqi war, while ignoring contradictory evidence of their policy position. McClellan also contends that President Bush once confessed to him having directly authorized the public exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Washington Democrats, many of whom rode along on the bandwagon rush to war, have done little or nothing to hold Bush accountable for his trumped-up war or for his unprecedented attempts to expand executive powers spying on Americans or circumventing the framework of the Geneva Conventions on detainee rights. Time has just about run out. To date, the war on Iraq has claimed the lives of more than 4,000 American servicemen and women, along with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and still the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, led by Michigan Rep. John Conyers, has not considered the option of impeachment. The House at large has taken no action in that direction, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying that impeachment proceedings are "off the table."
In a 2005 Zogby poll, 53% of Americans expressed support for the impeachment of the president if it was determined that he lied about the war, but the numbers supporting impeachment have plummeted since Democrats took over Congress and allowed the issue to dissolve. Only then-Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, now a Green candidate for president, has introduced articles of impeachment (in 2006), and Senator Russ Feingold's efforts to present even a scaled-back "censure" measure against the president for the described offenses has fallen on deaf ears. He has found only three co-sponsors for his bill.
The Constitutional promise of three equal branches of government and our rule of law fades into memory. "Shotgun Ed" Exley is nowhere to be found.
---
The BBC reports that an "uncontacted" indigenous tribe has been discovered along the border between Brazil and Peru, and they've got pictures. The photos are so extraordinary that they almost appear to have been doctored.
posted by CM @ 5:59 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home