Easy Target

The thing that keeps bothering me about the Jane Harman situation is that she's an easy and somewhat insignificant scapegoat in the larger failure of the Democratic party to offer any sort of meaningful resistance to Bush's attack on the Constitution and human dignity.

Right now, the person most responsible for letting the illegal wiretappers and the torturers go unpunished is President Obama. If anyone in Congress were serious about protecting the Constitution, the President would be impeached for his failure to do so. But, in reality, they're all more worried about mitigating the blame. And so now it's all Jane Harman's fault.

Don't get me wrong. Jane Harman is an asshole. But the idea that she is the only person who has to answer for any of this is absurd.

Update: I'd love to say here that the President is bowing to the massive pressure generated by the Yellow Blog calling for his impeachment...

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday left open the door to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and he did not rule out taking action against the lawyers who fashioned the legal guidelines for the interrogations.

But as any adult knows, "bipartisan commission" is Washington-speak for cop-out and gloss-over.