And now the real battle begins...

Dear Leader's legacy collapses

The main contribution that the new Democratic House/Congress can make is to hold serious oversight hearings on, among other things: pre-Iraq War intelligence, conduct of the Iraq War, preparations for an Iran War, war profiteering, the conduct of the Afghanistan war (particular the Battle of Tora Bora where Bin Laden and many of his most experienced fighters escaped), the whole field of torture in the Bush Gulag, the Valerie Plame leak, the leak of signals intelligence to Iran (far more serious in its implications than the Plame leak), the Hurricane Katrina fiasco, the state of anti-terrorism domestic preparedness, the illegal warrantless wiretapping program, the use of Presidential "signing statements" to promote a royalist Unilateral Executive theory of Presidential power, and the various corruption rings that the Republicans have been running on Capitol Hill.

The Republicans have clearly done pitifully little serious oversight of various other intelligence operations and that needs to change. A few tugs on those threads and we'll see several Iran-Contra type scandals of various levels of seriousness come squirming out. The "faith-based" social services program needs to be examined from top to bottom. We need real hearings on global warming. The various ways in which science has been subjugated to fundamentalist Christianity by the Cheney-Bush administration need to be examined, from the crackpot "abstinence" programs to the suppression of climate science findings to whatever weird stuff they've had the Centers for Disease Control doing. The functioning of the Office of the Vice President should be the subject of a whole investigation of its own.

Between Cheney's and Bush's Unilateral Executive theory that they can disregard any law or any Constitutional provision they choose, the President's formal veto power, and at least enough Republican Senators to block cloture in a filibuster, the Reps can stymie whatever positive legislative programs the Dems put forward. Congressional oversight is their real power and the place where they can do the most good. We're talking a serious battle for the American Constitutional system here.

Even before the election, the Reps were advising the Dems to be nice and "bipartisan". Forget it!  Forget-it-now!  The Reps have not the slightest intention of being nicey-nice bipartisan. Just the opposite. We're almost certain to see the most ferocious partisanship from them the next two years that the US has seen since the 1850s.

If you think the Reps have been hyperpartisan since 9/11 in 2001, just hold on to your seat.

The list of investigation topics above tells why. Digging into any of those things is going to produce embarassments and in many cases, evidence of serious criminal activities, in many cases of the most senior figures in the administration. And Cheney will want to fight over every subpeona in order to establish the principle of Executive supremacy, for Republican Executives, at least.

So the whole Republicans noise machine will be howling like demons from Hail about every investigation and using every one of their smear techniques, and maybe inventing some new ones, to discredit anyone and everyone who might embarass our Dear Leader Bush and Dark Lord Cheney.

It's gonna be ug-ly. Count on it.