Scandal Train now leaving on Track 1

Bush recently passed the 666 days-to-go mark, and with April's approach now has about 22 months remaining in his second term. At the current pace of scandal investigation, it seems unlikely that there will ever be a day when some part of Bush's Administration is not under Congressional assault from a House or Senate Committee. The U.S. Attorney fiasco demonstrates how fecund the Bushies are in producing specimens for dissection. No one even thought of that one before the ascendancy of the Democrats to two-house rule, which means the traffic jam of prior high crimes and misdemeanors from Bush's first six years will have to wait till the road up ahead is cleared.

Ordinarily a President would have a credible argument that all this investigation interrupts the orderly flow of governmental business; Bush's problem with this argument is that the American public, in overwhelming numbers have already seen what happens when Bush is allowed a free hand, and that's the last thing they want to give him again. If he never gets another unobstructed moment to do what he wants, so much the better. He is the fount from which all screw-ups flow. I think the United States is still waiting for just one thing from Bush he can call an accomplishment.

After the AG flap, I would expect the Congress to delve into the startling revelations from Waxman's oversight committee regarding Valerie Plame; to wit, the admission by the White House security director James Knodell that the White House never did any of its own investigation after her CIA cover was blown. When that one gains traction on the front pages and on the nightly news, Bush is going to have nowhere to hide, since it will become apparent that he must have known from the outset who leaked her identity. That's the reason no investigation was done.

After Gonzales is canned, the new AG will have to deal with the NSA/FISA spying crimes, and Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter will probably at last get to the bottom of how extensive the illegality became. The current revelations concerning the Patriot Act national security letters (and their wholesale abuse) are a preview of that coming attraction. Then on to a reprise of Abu Ghraib, when the more sordid and horrifying pictures and documents, previously suppressed by Republican inaction, are at last released, which will open the gateway to a recrudescence of the CIA prison/torture nightmare, which will probably lead to an amendment of the exoneration provisions in the Detainee Treatment Act and Military Commissions Act, leading to...

Bush's one way out is to initiate a war with Iran, and I'm sure Karl Rove, who sees his own fat butt increasingly in a sling, is whispering just such a suggestion to Georgie over their nightly Bourbon&7's.