October 2, 2006, The tribulations of the put-upon office wife
In this case, the office wife would be Secretary of State Incompetentalleezza Rice, in her former incarnation as the President's National Security Advisor, who, we learn after the publication of Bob Woodward's recent antidote to his earlier Bush hagiography, Dr. Rice seems to have... forgotten... critical details... like all of them... associated with a meeting in July, 2001 with CIA Director George Tenet urgently warning her of an impending Al Qaeda strike and begging her to alert the President (something else she seems to have forgotten to do.) In fairness to Secretary Rice, we tend to have what I'll call a "last clear chance" problem insofar as we learned from Ron Susskind's book that in August, 2001 another CIA briefer made it to the President himself, who famously responded "you've covered your ass" and then did nothing himself.
Still, it's interesting to note that according to Woodward's book (and there seems no reason not to trust that those around the President want all this to come out or they wouldn't have told Woodward), the President's real wife desperately wanted him to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, though presumably, as the President himself did not, we could expect that his office wife backed him on that.
Bruce the Veep sends this along from WaPo indicating that the 9-11 Commission (who did its part to get the Imperium reelected, after all) is furious that it wasn't let in on this secret July 2001 meeting (and how pissed Tenet was about Rice stonewalling him at the time) so that the Commission could have, you know, timely sanitized it the way it did everything else. Oh well.
The fact is, of course, that our national elections are decided not based on the people's knowledge, but by vast majority of the American people's ignorance of key facts, largely because they are (1) too stressed from just trying to make a living to be in a position to learn them and (2) blessed with a dumbed-down celebrity-driven media who helps make sure that they continue not to know anything. (Were things better in an era when people actually read newspapers? Well... in terms of knowledge of the electorate, I would say "yes." On balance, do we live in a nicer world than we did 100 years ago, 50 years ago, even 25 years ago, I'd say "sure". Than ten years ago, five years ago? Then I'd say, "give me a break". But that's just me.)
And there we have it. Is all this grounds for impeachment an investigation? Well... yes. If you all want that investigation, then we'll need at least one house of Congress (and hence subpoena power) to be in the hands of another party, if not both houses. No, we won't get anywhere real, and no one will actually be accountable, torture and the removal of habeas corpus will still be the law of the land and all, but at least people who deserve it will be forced to squirm in public.
It's not much. But we'll take it.