Three news stories this morning lend more ammunition to the powder keg we hope will
explode what’s left of W Ltd.’s credibility.
One is the top front-page story in The New York Times,
headlined in the print edition: “BUSH AIDES KEPT CLINTON’S PAPERS FROM 9/11
PANEL.” The subheads summarize the rest of the story: “AN EXPLANATION IS SOUGHT”
and “Aides to Ex-President Say Documents Could Help Commission’s Work.” (Go read. You
may notice the website’s headline doesn’t do the article justice.)
Another, headlined “2 Decline To Testify On Drug Cost,” is
buried deep within the paper. It reports that the White House, citing executive privilege,
has “refused to send Doug Badger, special assistant to the president for health policy, to testify
before the House Ways and Means Committee.”
The refusal naturally irked the Democrats on the committee. One of them called Badger “the
Condoleezza Rice for health care.” An excellent metaphor, doncha think?
The article also reports that the former Medicare administrator, Thomas A. Scully, who
threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster, if he shared his prescription-cost
estimates with Congress last year, has written the committee a letter “saying he had been busy
traveling and would be ‘unable to appear.'”
As every sentient citizen should know by now: “Mr. Foster’s figures are important because he
calculated that the cost of the prescription drug bill would exceed by about a third the $400 billion
that Congress was assuming in preparing the legislation for passage. Had his calculations been
widely known at the time, it is possible the measure would have failed, or at least been
significantly altered.”
The third article begins: “A federal judge ruled
Thursday that the Bush administration must release thousands of pages of documents related to a
White House task force that met behind closed doors to develop a national energy policy.
“The ruling,” it continued, “was a victory for the Natural Resources Defense Council,
an environmental lobbying group, and Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group. The two
organizations have been trying to find out whether the task force, headed by Vice President Dick
Cheney, was heavily influenced by energy executives and lobbyists.”
How many more strikes do we need to dump these guys?
