More bad news for Bush

I bet the Bush administration just hates getting out of bed these days. Everyday it seems they get hit with a flood of more bad news for Bush and his team.
The latest polling has Bush at an all-time low of 37 percent approval rating. The remarkable thing about that is that they can still find that many people who say that Bush is doing a good job.

Yesterday the Senate rebuffed the administration over its Iraq policy by demanding more oversight and passing a resolution saying that there should be a drastic reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq in 2006. It is clear that the Republicans have lost control of their agenda in the Congress and are now being forced to put up watered-down Democratic proposals to try and make it look like they are still in charge of things.

The New York Times is reporting a new torture scandal in Iraq.

173 detainees American troops discovered over the weekend in the basement of an Interior Ministry building in a Baghdad suburb had been tortured by their Iraqi captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers.

Hopefully, the new Iraqi government will deal with this promptly and decisively rather than trying to cover it up and stonewalling it like their political benefactors are apt to do.

But the big news today is in the Washington Post where we finally get hard evidence about which oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s secret task force that devised our current energy policies. Apparently, oil company executives were still lying to Congress about those meetings as recently as last week.
Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who chairs the Commerce Committee, may have been privvy to that deception because he conveniently (over Democratic objections) refused to put the oil execs under oath when they testified before his committee and swore they were not involved in any secret task force meetings. That effectively shielded them from any perjury charges, but it is still supposed to be a crime to lie to Congress anyway.

And finally, the Washington Post has the bombshell story about Bob Woodward of Watergate fame testifying to the grand jury investigating the CIA Leak scandal. It turns out that someone in the Bush administration had blabbed about Valerie Plame to Woodward more than two months before her identity was exposed to the world in Bob Novak’s column. What does this mean?
It means that Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation is alive and well and continuing to overturn more rocks in this seedy look at the underbelly of power politics in Washington.