Saturday, December 17, 2005

Congress Starts to Admit They Know What's Going On

"Fumbles spur new talk of oversight in D.C." in Sunday's Washington Post is the way they put it. The story calls them "fumbles," but they are much more than that. Dana Milbank, Recording Secretary of the Beltway, starts the story like this:

"Lawmakers have been caught by surprise by several recent reports, including the existence of secret U.S. prisons abroad, the CIA's detention overseas of innocent foreign nationals, and, last week, the discovery that the military has been engaged in domestic spying. After five years in which the GOP-controlled House and Senate undertook few investigations into the administration's activities, the legislative branch has begun to complain about being in the dark."

They've been in the dark all along, and are hardly surprised. This administration has been out of control since day one. We knew it, you knew it, Congress probably knew it, too---but now we KNOW THEY know it. So what will they do about it, now, at long last?
The dictionary has two definitions of oversight:

1. "failure by omission: a mistake, especially as a result of a failure to do or notice something."
2. "supervision: the responsibility of supervising something."

Having already accomplished #1, Congress is going to perform #2?

When it comes to fumbles, we find two definitions of the word:

1. fumbled action: an act or instance of fumbling (including to grope clumsily, to hesitate, to bungle something).
2. fumbled ball: in sports, a ball that is dropped or mishandled.

This administration has done it all, and much more. Will Congress step up?

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