A lotta chatter; a lotta "oh-pining" goin on

Oh, the "oh-pining"; yes, we loves-us some oh-pining, Dubya. Here is some of my favourite commentary about the indictments, the war, and the administration that brung-it-all-on:

The TorStar's Haroon Siddiqui warns Canadians about dropping our vigilance (Syria? Iran?):

The probe into Libby and Rove will mean something only if it serves as the start of a process of holding this administration fully accountable for the deaths of 2,000 Americans and between 30,000 and 100,000 Iraqis, and the torture of hundreds in American detention centres. The people who gave us Iraq are now targeting Syria and Iran, and are likely to get more belligerent in the days ahead to divert attention from their mounting domestic woes. Canadians need to be alert to the possibility that Stephen Harper and other local chicken hawks, who wanted Canada to go to war in Iraq, may now want us to do Bush's bidding in his new ventures abroad. [...]

[click "Read on, MacDuff!" to continue reading]

{Siddiqui, continued}
# His diplomatic offensive on Syria/Lebanon is also open to accusations of hypocrisy:
# He wants the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon disbanded, while turning a blind eye to the Kurdish and Shiite militias in Iraq.
He strikes moral poses on Syria but sent detainees to the torture chambers of Damascus, which is how Canadian Maher Arar ended up there. Canadian hands are not clean either. [...] The Bush presidency has been dangerous to the world and to America itself. Canadians need to remain vigilant about its potential fallout on us.

The NYT's Frank Rich remembers a simpler time:

For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the political competition at any cost. That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" were "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the "third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.

Former UN Weapons Inspector, Scott Ritter: Indicting America [see also: Seymour Hersh interviews Ritter about his new book, "Iraq Confidential"]:

The lies of Cheney, Libby and the Bush administration regarding Iraqi WMD did not take place in a vacuum. Congressional checks and balances, especially in the form of relevant oversight committees, were non-existent; the few hearings held served as little more than sham hearings designed to amplify a case for war that was accepted at face value, without question, despite the fact that all involved knew the supporting evidence was either non-existent or paper-thin.
The fourth estate was likewise reduced to little more than a propagandistic extension of the White House and Pentagon, losing any claim to journalistic integrity through its slavish parroting, without question, of anything that painted Saddam Hussein's regime in a negative light, especially when it came to the issue of retained WMD. At the receiving end of this tangled web of lies and incompetence are the American people.