Surprising things I've learned this decade

by shamanic It really has been a decade of learning new things. For instance, I used to think that when we fought wars, we delegated this task to the professional soldiers, sailors, and Marines that we taxpayers had spent so much money to train to win them, not to mention the fact that they are our friends and relatives and we can generally trust them to behave admirably and uphold our basic values even in difficult and dangerous circumstances. But now that we have such a marketplace of "independent contractors" to apparently fight our wars for us, I stand corrected. Another thing: I used to think that entities like the Justice Department were basically independent actors whose career personnel served, more or less, the public at large. Nope. White House press secretary Dana Perino said the Justice Department would refuse to convene a grand jury if either the full House or the full Senate approved the contempt citations; that would leave Democrats unable to force the question of the limits of executive privilege into the federal courts. "The constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile effort for Congress to refer contempt citations," Perino said. Who knew that the Justice Department was George Bush's personal fiefdom? If Bill Clinton had thought of this strategy, we might never have heard of Ken Starr. Ah, the missed opportunities of the past. Somehow, this type of stonewalling makes me want to grab the torches and the pitchforks and drive up to DC with a million angry countrymen and throw all the bums out of their cushy little village. But this is America, and I guess we've all got bills to pay, so we're a little too busy to push back the way crap like this deserves to be pushed back against.