It was asassinations of Al Qaeda operatives. Okay, awesome! Who doesn’t want to hunt down and smoke out and hang high our nation’s fearsome enemies? Tell Congress all about it! It’s not like any of them have Osama on speed dial, no matter what Rush says, so for fuck’s sake, what’s the problem here? Right after 9/11 congressmen were falling all over themselves (and most of them still are) to cross the finish line of Most Hardcore first. You really think they’d have had an issue with it?
It was even more illegal spying than the illegal spying we already knew about. Well damn, hooker, shit. That clearly would have been tough for Congress to accept, considering that they totally gave retroactive immunity to everybody who went along with the illegal spying we knew about and have prosecuted exactly no one for any of the previous lawbreaking. A little more might have pushed them over the edge? Honestly? They might have used adjectives in their sternly worded letters? You might as well tell Congress basically as a DARE.
I realize that I am presently arguing that Congress is such a bunch of stupendous pussies that it really doesn’t matter what sick and twisted shit Herr Cheney was up to in his secret bunker, that they would have agreed to it completely. Yet, no one who has been paying attention could argue this wasn’t the case.
Sure, a couple of speeches might have been given, and Feingold might have told the entire U.S. Senate to suck him once your mom was done, but in the end anything and everything would have been authorized lest Bill O’Reilly make fun of Democrats or some imaginary voter living in Chris Matthews’ head have concerns you might be the kind of pansy who drinks the wrong thing at the diner. They should have just owned up to it. Nobody would have stopped them.
Even with this major scary new revelatory whatever, no matter what it ends up being about, in about two weeks we’re going to have a resolution declaring it’s all okay, and nobody needs to go to jail or apologize or anything. I’d love to be proved wrong, by the way, but I don’t think I will be.
A.