Indeed:

[The Bush Administration] playing with a deck that’s out of aces. The only thing they have is fear. When it doesn’t work, they try to scare even more, but the obviousness of the lie forces an unprecedented backtrack.

Of course, this could all have been so much easier if the Democratic “leadership” had just draw a line in the sand from the day they took control of Congress and made it clear that they weren’t taking orders from an unpopular, lame duck, and proudly criminal administration.  Better late than never, bygones be bygones and all that, but there was nothing preventing them from taking this attitude earlier (and there is still nothing preventing the Senate from doing it, like, now.)  It would be the right thing to do, and it might make you slightly more popular than herpes, too.  More:

All of this says to me that the next President needs to open up the books on the Bush Administration, and that we cannot as a nation be truly healed until that happens. The intelligence leadership has been caught in an enormous lie, making false claims about lost surveillance gathering for purely political reasons. This cannot possibly be an isolated incident. Of coure, we KNOW it’s not an isolated incident. And indeed, many of the employees in the civil service who directed these lies and misstatements, not those at the top but the functionaries, will still be working in their same posts under a potential Democratic Administration. It needs to be extremely clear from the very beginning that they must be rooted out, expunged and turned over to the legal system for a determination. It should be a key part of the Democratic nominee’s platform. Only then can we truly “turn the page,” as our front-runner is likely to say.

It seems to me that Obama has essentially promised to do just that – though if promises were policy, we’d all be Nigerian billionaires now.  And the transparency needs to extend beyond bureaucrats. I’d like to know, for example, how close intelligence subcommittee head Jay Rockefeller has been to the various Bush era deceptions and shannanigans – partly for the health of the Republic and yada yada, but mostly so I can settle a bet as to whether he is simply the stupidest man alive, or if he is the stupidest man alive and a corrupt asshole.  I mean, seriously: how fucking stupid do you have to be to get rolled by Pat Roberts?  That’s like getting grifted by the Pepperidge Farm guy.  Jesus.