Oversight unseen

The Democratic Policy Committee held an oversight review wherein Democrats interviewed three recently retired military officers. Army Major General Paul D. Eaton, Major General John R.S. Batiste and Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes reiterated what so many other retired officers have already publically announced: Rumsfeld is a bungler, an irritant, and should be removed as Secretary of Defense. Hardly news these days but the strength of their statements redounded upon Rummy's already well documented ineptitude.

Batiste: Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build 'his plan,' which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace and set Iraq up for self-reliance.

[Rumsfeld] refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency. At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

Eaton: We went in with a bad plan. Stay the course is not a strategy.

Venturing into White House budget policy commentary,

Hammes:While asking major sacrifices, to include the ultimate sacrifice, from those Americans who are serving in Iraq, we are not even asking our fellow citizens to pay for the war. Instead we are charging it to our children and grandchildren.

In response to such blistering criticism, Republicans, led by a re-emerging yet still unholy Trent Lott, responded in the only way they know how: threaten the Democrats for holding such hearings, hearings the GOP have continuously refused to hold.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) is threatening to punish Democrats for using an Appropriations Committee room for an unofficial hearing on Iraq oversight if it happens again.

"They better stop this," the Mississippi Republican said. "This will be the last one or there will be retribution."

More hilarious than this whingeing, though, is Lott's further claim that Democrats are "abusing the system." Democrats, you see, are running roughshod over the poor, put-upon Republicans by pointing how what a lousy job they have done.

We have a White House running secret prisons, conducting extraordinary rendition and prisoner abuse as a matter of policy, while having lied their way into a war that has done nothing but foment more terrorism world wide. All of this has been rammed through by a Republican-led lapdog Congress. We've seen the GOP Congress laddle out budget-breaking tax cuts, give a pass on White House breaches of law, continue to ignore the devastation of New Orleans and keep residents from returning to perfectly good homes, locked away in a dismal sea of FEMA trailers.

But it is the Democrats who are abusing the system.