Surprise, surprise! Thanks to one-party rule, even the Senate whitewash on how we were lied into Iraq isn't coming anytime soon (if ever)

The least surprising shock of the day is that the GOP has already all but succeeded in preventing release before the election of the long-promised, sure-to-be-heavily-sanitized Senate report on how the administration lied its (and, more important, our) way into Iraq.

And don't hold your breath after the election either. Remember the reports we weren't going to get until after the last national election?

It seems like just yesterday--actually, it was the day before--that I was whining about how gullible Democrats had been hornswoggled into spreading the Republicans' carerfully crafted propaganda lie that it didn't matter how we got into the Iraq quagmire, all that mattered was what we did now. ("The very fact that the righties are so fraidy-scared of the truth should tell us that it's worth digging out and preserving and building on," I wrote.) Today comes a report by Dafna Linzer in the Washington Post headlined:

Report on Prewar Intelligence Lagging
Information Democrats Want Most Might Not Come Out Until After Election

Nine months ago, "when angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate last year to protest the slow pace of a congressional investigation into prewar intelligence," Linzer recalls, "Republicans called it a stunt but promised to quickly wrap up the inquiry. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is overseeing the investigation, said his report was near completion and there was no need for the fuss."

It turns out--surprise!--that Roberts (pictured above) was just plain lying. Linzer quotes anonymous "committee sources" as saying that there was essentially nothing written back then, that in fact "they had started almost from scratch in November after Democrats staged their protest."

Pat Roberts--not to be confused with the Rev. Pat Robertson, though he's every bit as odious--is nothing but a pathetic, dimwitted, dishonest cog in the right-wing propaganda machine, and every step of the way has done literally everything in his power to prevent and then limit any investigation.

Now, of course, Roberts's stooges are busily concocting new and even more preposterous lies to replace and cover for their many previous sets of lies. You can be sure that the report they are concocting will be the most sanitized whitewash of the unbroken chain of lies and outright crimes with which the Bush administration tricked tragically gullible Americans into blank-checking their war of ideological adventurism.

It is, of course, only Americans' seemingly limitess gullibility and don't-give-a-flying-fuck-about-reality attitude that stand between a worthless scumbag like Roberts and the lifetime prison sentence he should be serving for his eager participation in a massively criminal coverup.

Here's what I wonder: When a creature like Pat Roberts looks in the mirror in the morning to shave, what do you suppose he sees?

Well, when there is no price to be paid for lying, not to mention willfully incompetent management and turning wars and disasters into opportunities for large-scale profiteering by cronies and cash customers, I guess there's no reason for some politicians not to do it--assuming that they themselves don't see any reason.