Roberts Getting Heat at Home
20 February 2006 10:24 am by Taylor Marsh
Roberts Getting Heat at Home
Many Kansans, including members of The
Eagle editorial board, have long admired Sen. Pat Roberts for his plainspokenness
and reputation for fair brokering of issues.
So it's troubling that Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
is fast gaining the reputation in Washington, D.C., as a reliable partisan apologist
for the Bush administration on intelligence and security controversies. We hope
that's not true. But Roberts' credibility is on the line. EDITORIAL:
ROBERTS' CREDIBILITY ON LINE
This morning on C-SPAN there was an amazing forum talking about
executive power. I'll watch just about anything that features Lawrence Tribe,
as well as John Dean, whom I had the privilege of interviewing. Senator Roberts
is at the center of this argument today because he heads the Senate Intelligence
committee and is the one person most responsible for letting the president and
vice president get away with murder… er… or maybe I should simply say, shooting
the Constitution full of holes. It will suffice.
But when your home state paper starts calling you a "shill,"
it's time to wake up a smell your political reputation on fire.
What's bothering many, though, is that
Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to
conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and
possible violations of law.That's not oversight — it's looking
the other way.
For years, Senator Pat Roberts has done just that, look the other
way. It prompted Senator
Harry Reid to invoke Rule 21.
Frankly, it's bad enough that Senator Jay Rockefeller wrote a
note to Deadeye Dick that sat in a safe for over a year. It's bad enough that
Democrats didn't find a way to break their silence on the NSA
warrantless wiretaps earlier, through counsel or some other method.
The "fly-over" territory, as Kansas and the midwest
are so fondly called, are waking up to what's going on. Deadeye Dick's recent
law evading shenanigans hurt the Republicans a great deal, if only in image
and in solidifying what regular folks had begun to challenge: Bush and Cheney's credibility. Let's face it, it's in the crapper. Senator Roberts
is now on the home fire spits. He's earned the heat.
