Corrupt Congress, I love America

Remember how I was all pissed off because Bill Frist slipped legislation about online gambling into a bill about port security? Remember how he did it at the last minute before Congress took a recess for elections so that nobody would have time to change the language, and everyone would have to vote for it because the security parts were too important to vote against?

Well maybe you can't get yourself worked up about that because you don't gamble online and you don't care if the government is acting more and more like your nanny. So how about this story (NY Times, login required, just use www.bugmenot.com) to piss you off?

There was an office in Iraq called the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction that monitored corruption in the way US funds were being used and the way contracts were awarded.

"Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces."

And a couple weeks ago some huge sprawling bill was signed into law by President Bush, legislation that Congress passed without anyone bothering to read it, and it contained an obscure clause that shuts down that office and their investigations. Somebody, and nobody seems to know who, secretly slipped that provision into a bill knowing that it would never be noticed or debated.

The investigations kept embarrassing the administration by uncovering the rampant corruption in Iraq, so they quietly shut it down. This is how America works. I'm swelling with patriotic pride.

Glenn Greenwald wrote:

"That is as good a snapshot as any of the incomparably destructive one-party Republican rule to which we have been subjected. This small story has virtually every element of how they function."

And goes on to point out that "A Democratic takeover of the House is the one thing that can ensure that Americans will learn of what has been done." He wrote an excellent entry a couple weeks ago on that subject:

In my view, more than anything else, this will be the value of a Democratic takeover of at least one of the houses of Congress. As much wrongdoing as we have learned about on the part of Bush administration already, it is almost certainly the case that there is much, much more that we don't know about, but ought to.

...A Democratic takeover of one or even both houses of Congress is unlikely to result in any new affirmative legislation or policies, since their control will be by only a small margin, dependent on conservative lawmakers in their majority, and subject to a presidential veto. With some exceptions (such as the power to control appropriations and cut off funding), the real power they will have will be to investigate and expose the conduct of the Bush administration and to reveal to Americans what has really been going on.

I really hope that the Democrats win control of Congress on Tuesday, not because I have any love or even respect for their party, but because I know they'll at least be an adversary to the rampant corruption of the Republican regime that has been operating unchecked for the last 6 years.

It just makes me want to sing the national anthem.