Let’s play hypotheticals. After all, I love them more than I love many other things in the world.
It’s 9/12/01, and the United States has just been attacked by terrorists. As thousands of Americans are now dead, the President says we don’t need to have any investigations into what happened and the intelligence failures that lead to it. In fact, we should just sit tight because George W. Bush would let his government investigate itself. A few months later, Tom Delay comes out and says there’s nothing to see, and standing beside him, Robert Moller, the head of the FBI nods approvingly.
How many people in the real world would suddenly go “Oh, phew, the government says the government didn’t do anything wrong. Let’s all relax, now.”
Hopefully nobody, right?
Well, we know that we didn’t have such a thing happen because we ended up having a 9/11 Commission that, essentially, wasted millions upon millions of tax dollars only to arrive at the conclusion that it was a failing of many agencies, a too-strict ahderence to protocols that crippled them, and a lack of preparedness on the part of the airlines. No matter how obvious it was, we needed an independent commission to tell us this.
A few months ago, many of the Presidential candidates (and even some current members of the House and Senate) were talking about an independent commission to investigate the causes for going to war with Iraq. Oh sure, President Bush told us it was for the right reasons, but why believe him? He’s part of the problem man! Talks are still circulating that this is what the left side of the aisle wants, and some have even mentioned impeachment.
In the corruption case of Rod Blagojevich, we’ve seen no such objectivity. On Wednesday, the Obama team dumped a huge lump of documents on reporters about to break for their Christmas vacation, and in essence they just told everyone, “yeah, everything’s cool. Nothing to see here, move along.” We’re meant to believe that because Obama’s team has told us that there was nothing improper in regards to his vacant Senate seat, we should believe him.
When the hell did this happen? Why is it that we have to have an independent commision and investigation to look into everything that happens except whether or not the President Elect of the United States or one of his duly appointed surrogates acted improperly in trying to buy a Senate seat from the Governor of Illinois? Why is it that his word is good enough for everyone?
For 8 years, under President Bush, as the media questioned every move he made and word he spoke, we heard about the importance of an adversarial media. Was that just a smoke screen for their partisan bias and bitter sting from their fair-haired boys Al Gore and John Kerry losing their respective elections to this man who they went out of their way to portray as an incompetent dope?
It’s something to think about as the Blagojevich case moves along and we start hearing the media taking Obama and his team on their word that nothing improper was done. I for one am sick of the double-standards.
