Hullabaloo

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

 
Too Busy Laughing

by digby


Hullabaloo is proud to present another episode of "Imagine If This Were A Democrat" this week starring Condoleeza Rice:

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

[...]

The settlement discussions are a result of months of work by a joint task force of the United States attorneys of the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, with help from Italian authorities. Kent Robertson, a spokesman for Chevron, said “regarding the oil-for-food program generally, Chevron purchased Iraqi crude oil principally for use in its U.S. refineries and the United Nations approved the initial sale of all cargos ultimately purchased by Chevron.”

He said Chevron has cooperated with inquiries into the program “and we will continue to do so.”

The United States attorney’s office and the office of the New York district attorney both declined to comment.

Thus far, only former United Nations officials, individual traders and relatively small oil companies have come under scrutiny in the United States.

According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.

Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.

Our show will take you back in time to a world where the entire political and media establishment rose up in horror at the merest rumor of impropriety among the president's advisors and cabinet --- to a time when editorial writers would have thundered about the unacceptability of a former National Security Advisor and current Secretary of State having even been remotely associated with such illegality and malfeasance. Indeed, in that era, it would have been considered inconceivable that someone under such a cloud could possibly be allowed to continue to represent the nation abroad in times of such great peril. Calls for resignation would be loud and boisterous.

Today scandals bubble for months in the blogosphere, pooh-poohed by the cognoscenti as trivial. Until half a dozen Republican Federal Prosecutors are forced to blow the whistle, no one even thinks it's worth looking into. In fact, it's all very droll:

But folks like Karl Rove--and the not-so-dearly departed Tom DeLay--have no respect for the beauty of such balance. Unwilling to leave such weighty matters as choosing leaders to the whim of the unwashed masses, they spent their days trying to rig the system so that the playing field was irretrievably slanted in favor of their team: gerrymandering voting districts, pressuring U.S. attorneys to pursue partisan prosecutions, urging federal agencies to operate with an eye toward partisan gain, and otherwise harnessing the machinery of government for political means. Their entire goal is to screw up the natural cycle--to ensure that, no matter how miffed voters get, the structural barriers to change will be insurmountable.

This is why DeLay had to go. And it is why, if the gods of politics are just, Rove will eventually find himself in equally deep poo. Guys like this aren't just trying to destroy the opposing party. They are mucking around with the fundamentals of our entire political system.Which would make me want to pop someone in the nose--if I weren't so busy chuckling at just how many of the Bushies' tawdry little schemes are now boomeranging back to bite them on their complacent, corrupt, entitled, incompetent backsides.

A real laugh riot.

I fully expect the press to stop chuckling once a Democrat is in the white house, however. They will take stock and realize that they need to provide the kind of skeptical, muckraking coverage they used to before the Bush administration came in. The mea culpas and promises to do better will abound --- they will have "learned from their mistakes" and will pursue even the slightest appearance of impropriety going forward. And the Right Wing Noise Machine will be there to help them with the foot work. They make quite a team.


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digby 5/08/2007 10:47:00 AM |