I'm stealing this from Kausfiles, but it was clear when Pelosi and Kerry and Kennedy got on the news to complain that Congress Wasn't Informed that this was going nowhere.

Rumsfeld yesterday, following a diatribe from Robert Byrd:

"Senator, uh, the facts are somewhat different than that."

How can you not love that?

Wretched at the Belmont Club has a long, circuitous, but worthwhile read as background to why this will go nowhere except with the rabid anti-Bushies. The Media is in a frenzy and trying their best to make something out of it and it's becoming annoying. The perps. need to do a little time for stupidity more than anything else. What could they have been thinking?

Hugh Hewitt was playing audio from the hearings yesterday, specifically Senator Mark Dayton's (D from Minnesota) meltdown/diatribe/incoherent babble as he tried to nail Rumsfeld and the Chairman of the JCS on the "supression" of the news coverage. General Meyer explained calmly to Dayton that he asked (not commanded) CBS to put off (not quash altogether)running their story because the reaction from the Iraqi insurgents would put US servicemen and civilians at greater risk. Dayton agreed that it would put them at risk, but then launched into a rant that it was against the values of a democratic society to supress such news. So Dayton believes that instant and widespread dissemination of all news that paints the US in a bad light is more important to democracy than the lives of US soldiers and civilians. "Don't get it" is an understatement when describing these morons.

Wha you're seeing now is a slightly more sophistcated attack on the military by the "spitting contingent" -- the ones who 30-35 years ago would have been expectorating at returning Vietnam vets (well, at least those who didn't admit to their war crimes before a congressional committee) as a way of protesting the war. They've learned enough to know that open hostility towards the regular troops isn't going to fly with the public, so they've set their sights a little higher, and are targeting people like Meyer, Rumsfeld in hopes of eventually getting at Bush.

Had the CBS broadcast of the photos actually been a true disclosure of a hidden scandal and not merely the visual representation of what the Army had been investigating for 3 1/2 months and what the New York Times and others had reported 2 1/2 months ago, this strategy might have worked. But calling for the immediate release of all information after an initial report already has been done by the Army comes across as just more showboating from some of the same folks who thought this strategy would work last month during the 9/11 hearings.

When I listen to Byrd and Kennedy I wonder why we think the UN is so bad.

He he he. For all the "responsibility" mavens that appear to populate the Republican circles, its interesting to note that whenever a Republican is expected to be "responsible" and face the "consequences" of their actions, they duck such. Bunch of hypocrites.

Plutarch:

You seem confused. We've said that those involved will have to be disciplined, but that it's not a big deal that prisoners get abused by guards. If you and I were guards we'd abuse prisoners.