How Surprised Are You That Trump's Department Of Homeland Security Heads Are Serving Illegally?

Illegal appointment

If you're looking for the worst villains of the Trump era, your head will soon be spinning. That said, no list can possibly leave off the authors of Trump's military assault against Portland, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli. As congressional Democrats have asserted, neither is legally serving in the government. Yesterday Washington Post reporter Erica Werner wrote the Government Accountability Office has found that "Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and his deputy Kenneth Cuccinelli are serving under an invalid order of succession under the Vacancies Reform Act." Their appointments by Trump violated federal law. "The Vacancies Reform Act," she wrote, "governs how temporary appointments can be made to positions that require Senate confirmation. President Trump has repeatedly circumvented the Senate confirmation process by placing people in acting positions-- including Wolf and Cuccinelli."

GAO said it was referring the matter to the DHS inspector general for reviews, and that any further actions would be up to Congress and the IG.

Wolf was a deputy chief of staff in the Trump administration before rising through the ranks, in part because of his repeated public professions of support for Trump and his hard line views on immigration. Wolf has played a central role in the government’s controversial response to protests throughout the United States this summer, actions some former DHS officials from both parties have said crossed the line.

Cuccinelli, formerly the attorney general of Virginia, is also an immigration hard-liner who also served as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In March, a federal judge ruled that his appointment to head USCIS was illegal and that he lacked the authority to issue policy directives tightening asylum rules.

GAO noted that it was not examining the question of the consequences of Wolf and Cuccinelli’s improper appointments, or the impact on the actions they have taken in those roles, instead referring those questions to the DHS inspector general.

DHS quickly issued a statement opposing GAO’s conclusion.

“We wholeheartedly disagree with the GAO’s baseless report and plan to issue a formal response to this shortly,” DHS spokesman Nathaniel Madden said in a statement.

The GAO conducted its review in response to inquiries from House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform.

In a statement responding to GAO’s findings, Thompson and Maloney called on Wolf and Cuccinelli to resign from their roles.

“GAO’s damning opinion paints a disturbing picture of the Trump administration playing fast and loose by bypassing the Senate confirmation process to install ideologues,” Thompson and Maloney said. “In its haste to circumvent Congress’s constitutional role in confirming the government’s top officials to deliver on the president’s radical agenda, the administration violated the department’s order of succession, as required by law.”

Trump has publicly discussed his preference for having people in his administration serving in an acting capacity, saying this gives him “more flexibility.”

Trump ousted Nielsen in April 2019, and since then the White House has displayed an unprecedented disregard for the Senate confirmation process. McAleenan served seven months without a nomination, and though Trump has effusively praised Wolf, he has not received a nomination for the secretary position.

Across the department, career officials have retired or resigned from their jobs without replacement, and the White House has made no effort to push for the confirmation of its more recent appointees, despite GOP control of the senate.

The leadership page of the DHS website shows empty seats and interim appointments across the agencies charged with protecting the country from terrorist attacks and other threats, with more than 20 vacancies and acting chiefs among senior department positions.

In addition to the temporary appointments at DHS headquarters, none of the three agencies that run the country’s immigration system--U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)-- have a Senate-confirmed leader.

I frankly never really understood how the corruption-as-a-way-of-life New Jersey Democratic Party allowed a strong and effective progressive like Bonnie Watson Coleman to rise in the ranks and get all the way to Congress... but, then, Rep. Watson Coleman is a force of nature-- and now a senior member of the the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of its Subcommittee on Oversight, Management and Accountability. "DHS has been a serious problem in so many levels," she told me this morning in an informal conversation. "Can’t wait to change from the top down and looking forward to more humane policies. The Committee has called on Wolf to testify on the Portland nightmare (one of many); he declined saying we didn’t give him adequate notice. I’ve asked for him to resign. I honestly don’t see getting rid of him and or Cuccinelli until Trump is out. But we just need to keep calling them out for their lack of humanity, the chaos and disruption and their storm trooper-like actions. It’s disgusting, scary and as you know, threatens our democracy."

This is from the statement released yesterday by committee chairs Maloney and Thompson:

Does Gov. Chris "Tub o' Slime" Christie at least get a coupla points deducted for lying his putrid guts out?

Do the three fingers mean that the governor plans to tell only three lies, or that he's only telling three lies at this exact moment?

carte blanche n. Unrestricted power to act at one's own discretion; unconditional authority. [Fr.: carte, document + blanche, blank]

-- The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition

"Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about 'hard choices' in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state's gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise."

-- from "Report Disputes Christie's Basis for
Halting Tunnel" by the NYT's Kate Zernike

by Ken

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey exaggerated when he declared that unforeseen costs to the state were forcing him to cancel the new train tunnel planned to relieve congested routes across the Hudson River, according to a long-awaited report by independent Congressional investigators.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey's share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

-- from Kate Zernike's NYT report (see above)

Well, now, I think Kate is just being polite when she says that Governor Blimpo "exaggerated." The appropriate word here would be "lied." When you yammer about unforeseen costs, and all the known costs were already on the table, that's not an exaggeration, it's a lie, especially when you make up numbers that don't actually exist anywhere. "Misstated," in the third paragraph, seems more accurate -- a merely politer way of saying "lied."

What's more, it should be clear to anyone who recalls the brouhaha when the Blimp That Talks announced his astonishing reversal of the tunnel project, a potentially vital piece of additonal New York-New Jersey transport infrastructure, that those things that he exaggerated/misstated/lied about were in fact the pillars of his case for taking the drastic step.

Man, I could just spit!

It was just yesterday that I was talking, yet again, about the right-wing extremists' now-official unlimited License to LIe, drawing on testimony from Paul Krugman and James Surowiecki about the basic lyingness of Paul "You Don't Have to Choose Between a Crackpot and a Liar" Ryan's phony-baloney "deficit reduction" budget.

As Surowiecki pointed out in a New Yorker "Financial Page" column, "Call That a Budget?," "[T]he simple truth is that [Ryan's budget] plan is not an evenhanded attempt to solve America’s long-term budget problems. It’s a profoundly radical document, its proposals skewed by ideological biases."

Krugman, meanwhile, was exploring (in his NYT column "The Gullible Center") what he called "the Ryan phenomenon," curious not about the man ("a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class") but about "the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan -- and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can't seem to let go of their fantasy."

Well, our Paul (Paul K, that is) could with a minimum of effort produce a parallel column about "the Christie phenomenon," about the cult that has grown around the Karl Rove collaborator who, after just barely getting himself elected governor of New Jersey in a three-way race that included a deeply unpopular Democratic incumbent, quickly wangled his way into the political spotlight "as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt," as Kate Zernike puts it in her NYT report on the impending GAO report.

Between them, Ryan and Christie demonstrate how large an opening there is at present for a make-believe "icon of fiscal responsibility," engaging in the masquerade because (a) it plays well to gullible voters, and (b) it provides such fine cover for their actual radical right-wing agendas. Let's not forget how much mileage the Gasbag Governor got out of demonizing the public-employee unions he so cleverly and lyingly portrayed as What's Wrong With the Country -- a pack of lies that has been coming apart for the equally mendacious and extremist governors of Ohio and Wisconsin.

I don't think it's any stretch at all to apply to Governor Christie the logic that Krugman laid out yesterday for approval for Paul Ryan among the new wave of fake "centrists," who aren't really in the center of anything but have merely staked out some political turf as above-the-fray brokers between the unacceptable extremes. Krugman argued that their reason for existing depended on the possibility of, you know, responsibly splitting the difference.

The "centrists" needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated [Mr. Ryan, "an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one"] for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations."]

It's worth noting that the GAO report that brands Governor Gasbag as a liar was requested by NJ Sen. Frank Lautenberg. I think we need to give him credit for not simply accepting the heaps of bullshit the governor was dumping on an otherwise alarmingly acquiescent public. And on the basis of what we know about the report, please understand that we're not talking about a "difference of opinion," or even a "difference of emphasis." On the most basic issues solemnly thrust at us to defend his decision, he was simply lying. We know this now with 100 percent certainty.

Blimpo just assumed that the people, in the media as well as the general public, he was talking down to are low-grade morons who could be hornswoggled with his phony posture of fiscal rectitude, the pretense of being the Man Who Blew the Whistle on Decades of Left-Wing Largesse. If anyone can figure a way he didn't know that his entire announced rationale for pulling the plug on the tunnel was a tissue of fabrications, I'd love to hear it.

I suppose it's just a matter of time now before the overstuffed tool of the 1% (and its tools; I think he thinks of his "constituency" as being the white-collar criminal class that looks to fatten up on the trickled-down crumbs of the economic elites) pulls on those jumbo super-flame-retardant pants for a press conference at which he announces his resignation, on the ground that he's simply too dishonest to hold public office.


AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR
PHONY ICONS OF "FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY" . . .

Can we at least hope that, for example, when the Washington Post runs a story under the game-changingly dramatic-sounding headline "Health-care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds," that a growing number of readers will take it for granted that with a minimum amount of knowledgeable poking around the new "study" -- by reality-based pokers, of course -- it will be revealed to be 99.9 percent lying bullshit?

Ah, it won't matter. By then all the licensed-to-lie lying liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine will have adopted it as a fact that there's a "new study" that shows that the health-care law will add $340 billion to the deficit.

#

There's probably something that can't be blamed on the Bush regime's slash-and-burn philosophy of governing, but inadequate fire preparedness isn't it

Howie has already called attention below to Michael Roston's Huffpost report citing the recent GAO report on inadequate government preparation for this and future fire seasons.

No, the ideological sociopaths and profiteering thugs of the regime didn't cause the Southern California fires, any more than they caused Hurricane Katrina. What they did was make sure that governmental resources were sufficiently mismanaged, with the usual heavy doses of politicizing and privatizing, to set the stage for catastrophe.

We could probably all have written the outlines of this story, but Michael has filled in the blanks:

In a June report, the GAO report faulted the U.S. Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, and other agencies for failing to accomplish the "fundamental step" of planning out what assets and resources were needed to prepare for approaching fire seasons. Meanwhile, disaster response problems that have become all too familiar in recent years were also identified: administration officials placing resources where they were politically expedient, and using poorly performing contractors to accomplish critical national tasks.

"If you don't have goals and strategies for carrying them out, you're in a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode," Robin Nazarro, director of GAO's Natural Resources and Environment program and lead author of the report, told HuffPost. "They say they are using 5 to 10 year averages, but each year the fires gets worse, so they're always underestimating what they need."

You should read the whole report, but it's creepily more of the same old same old. Incompetent don't-give-a-damn planning, with large-scale siphoning off of tax dollars to "national contractors" who one supposes will turn out to be another set of the usual disaster-profiteering regime cronies.

I don't even recall which of the Bush-regime-inspired catastrophes Paul Krugman was commenting on last week on Countdown when Keith Olbermann pressed him for some glimmering of why, and he noted that the right-wing loonies--uh, my phrase, not his--just go crazy over any suggestion that people have any responsibility to help one another. It just drives them nuts. And no one has argued more persuasively than Krugman that one of the central missions of this administration has been to prove that government is truly incompetent to deal with problems, even (or especially) problems that have been attacked with success in the past by honest and competent government officials. (Remember the Clinton-era FEMA that was widely admired for its commitment to emergency preparedness?)

Couple this fundamental underlying psychosis with that other great philosophical underpinning of modern "conservative" government--that government exists for the purpose of helping its friends, cronies, and cash contributors steal every dollar that isn't nailed down--and you've got, well, the same old same old.

No wonder the Bushfolk soiled their diapers over that leaked draft of the GAO report on progress in Iraq--the released report is pretty devastating

It is unclear whether sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased--a key security benchmark--since it is difficult to measure perpetrators’ intents, and various other measures of population security from different sources show differing trends. As displayed in figure 4 (see above), average daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007.
--from the GAO report Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq, released today

Say, you remember that Government Accountability Office (GAO) report of which the Washington Post got hold of a draft last week? The one that promised to be such bad news for the Bush regime, and--as we noted here--was apparently leaked because at least some insiders believed the Bush regime would manage to have the final report seriously watered down, the way the regime stifles every attempt to report objectively on its doings.

Well, the final report--Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq--was presented today, as promised, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Faiz at Think Progress had a summary up almost immediately, with a link to a pdf of the full report. While it would be fascinating to compare the final version with the leaked draft, the published report is pretty devastating. It bears the subtitle: "Iraqi Government Has Not Met Most Legislative, Security, and Economic Benchmarks."

Here is U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker (below) explaining the GAO's mandate from Congress:

I am pleased to appear today to discuss our report on whether or not the government of Iraq has met 18 benchmarks contained in the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act of 2007 (the Act). The Act requires GAO to report on the status of the achievement of these benchmarks. Consistent with GAO’s core values and our desire to be fair and balanced, we also considered and used a “partially met” rating for some benchmarks. In comparison, the Act requires the administration to report on whether satisfactory progress is being made toward meeting the benchmarks. The benchmarks cover Iraqi government actions needed to advance reconciliation within Iraqi society, improve the security of the Iraqi population, provide essential services to the population, and promote economic well-being.

Faiz's post includes a table from the report which tabulates the 18 benchmarks with their degree of "met"-ness and a succinct "status" report. I don't know if you've ever actually looked at the famous benchmarks. They range from the purely bureaucratic to the utopianly unattainable, but the one thing they have in common, emphatically including the three that the GAO has found to be "met" and the four found to be "partially met," is that they really don't seem to mean much of anything substantive at any implementation level likely to occur in the real world.

I thought you might like to take a look at the documented "successes." Here are the three benchmarks that the GAO report credits as "met":

8. Establishing supporting political, media, economic, and services committee in support of the Baghdad security plan.

status: Committees established.

14. Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods around Baghdad.

status: 32 of 34 stations established.

16. Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.

status: Legislators' rights protected; minority citizens' rights unprotected.

And here are the four benchmarks found to have been "partially met":

4. Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections.

status: Law enacted; implementation scheduled for 2008.

9. Providing three trained and ready brigades to support Baghdad operation.

status: Forces provided; some of limited effectiveness.

12. Ensuring that, according to President Bush, Prime Minister Maliki said "the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."

status: Militia infiltration of some security forces enables some safe havens.

17. Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.

status: Funds allocated but unlikely to be fully spent.

What???

Overall, it looks to me like the reported "status" is likely to represent, not a work-in-progress, but as-good-as-it's-going-to-get. And this is the good news.

As early Think Progress commenter Raven noted:

Not a very good report card, is it?

The three (only three) benchmarks met are very telling in themselves.

Commitees, command posts, and the rights of legislators. Sounds like the neo-con dream.

Another Think Progress commenter, billjpa, struck even closer to the heart of the matter:

I repeat - SO WHAT! you post, maybe more sphere folks post, BUT the major media sources aren’t touching it.
It was released today-Right?
MSNBC - full day of political news - So far -1:10 PM - NOT A WORD!
Like I said – SO WHAT!

Perhaps billjpa was judging hastily, and the report will be splashed all over the damn place--headlining all the evening newscasts, for example.

Or then again, perhaps not.

A BLUE AMERICA POLICY CLARIFICATION-- BUSH DOG'S NEED NOT APPLY

In the last couple of days, in between Larry Craig's adventures in Republican Toiletland stories, we've had a few posts about the $50 billion supplemental to the supplemental. Basically Bush wants another $50 bil (on top of the outrageous $147 billion) for his war profiteering schemes in Iraq. Seventy of our kind of Democrats sent him a letter saying the only money they would vote to approve is money for a safe and speedy redeployment of our troops. Yesterday Ken did a piece on the GAO report that exposes the Bush Regime's blatant lies about how swimmingly everything is going in Iraq-- and how they are now trying to force the GAO to "edit" the report conform to Regime propaganda.

In lieu of impeachment, treason, and war crimes trials for Bush and his cronies, don't you think Congress should put their foot down now just and say no? Just "no." I know we're ready to say just no to anyone, regardless of political party, who votes yes on the Bush supplemental or on any compromise to funnel any more money into the Iraq war rathole. Of the incumbents Blue America has endorsed so far, 4 have already pledged to vote no on Bush's request for more money-- Steve Cohen (TN), who is under vicious attack from Harold Ford's rightist political machine, John Hall (NY), Jerrold Nadler (NY), and Hilda Solis (CA). I feel confident that our other incumbents, Carol Shea-Porter (NH), Patrick Murphy (PA), Tom Allen (ME), and Jerry McNerney (CA), will do likewise next week. If they don't, you still will be able to donate to their campaigns if you want to-- but not through Blue America. And the only incumbent currently scheduled for a Blue America endorsement and live session is our old friend Paul Hodes (NH) and he has already pledged to vote against any funding that isn't to bring the troops home. If I'm being too subtle here, Scarecrow has an explanation over at FDL.

Yesterday I was on the phone for a while with a campaign manager for a Democrat running for a House seat. He was speaking for himself and not his candidate. He told me that the problem in Iraq is very real and the dangers inherent to it are very grave and that the solution is not a soundbyte. All true, but not really relevant to what Congress can accomplish. The war was wrong when it was started and it is wrong now. The American presence there has always done one thing and one thing only: made a bad situation worse. There is no good answer to Iraq-- other than war crimes trials for Bush and Cheney, et al-- but there is one thing that must change and must change as fast as possible (tomorrow, next week, a month?) and that is the presence of American troops in Iraq.

Even a hack and tool like Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) recognizes the Bush Regime Greed Zone congressional dog and pony show for what it is. Not a word that comes out of Bush's mouth or the mouths of any of his cronies can be believed under any circumstances whatsoever-- which is why he should have been impeached and why an increasing number of people are seeing Nancy Pelosi as complicit in the Regime's crimes. Now Inside the Beltway war criminals are calling for the ouster of Bush's favored, hand-picked (not legitimately elected) Iraqi puppet, Nouri al-Maliki. Will he be the next Ngo Dinh Diem?

This morning's NY Times has three unrelated stories which should make every American furious enough to demand we get the hell out of Iraq-- a story about us re-doing the disaster known as the Iraqi police force; another in the endless tales of Bush crony corporate corruption in Iraq; and a thought piece on how the gulf between Sunnis and Shi'a has widened since Bush-- who had never heard of either before deciding to take over the joint-- came on the scene and destroyed civil society. These all point to what the cowardly Colin Powell told Bush before the invasion he supported (even if only reluctantly). Powell mixed up his duty to the citizens of the United States of America with his loyalty to the madman who had stolen the 2000 election and was determined to make a name for himself. By telling Bush that if he "broke" Iraq he would "own" it-- a concept that was certainly too abstract for a functional imbecile like Bush to understand-- Powell may have thought he had done his duty. He thought wrong.

There was one Iraq story in the Times that I absolutely loved. An airplane carrying right wing warmongers Mel Martinez (R-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), James Inhofe (R-OK) and Bud Cramer (D-AL) was shot at taking off from Baghdad and forced to take evasive maneuvers. These are 3 rubber stamp Republican senators and a Bush Dog, all 4 of whom very much deserving to be charged as enablers in Bush's war crimes. Of course, in something like this "almost" doesn't count.


UPDATE: KENDRICK MEEK COMES BACK FROM IRAQ READY TO JUST SAY NO

Congressman Kendrick Meek (D-FL) just came back from Iraq with a very different impression than Brian Baird. Baird, Jason Altmire and other Bush Dogs may happily go along with the regime's odious agenda, but Meek makes it clear that he has a more thoughtful-- and more sensible-- position.




UPDATE: VOTERS IN NORTHEAST MASSACHUSETTS CONSIDER DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO WAR FUNDING

The Blue America-endorsed candidate in next Tuesday's MA-05 primary, Jamie Eldridge opposes any more funding to escalate Bush's war agenda and only supports spending money to safely and redeploy our troops out of Iraq. Eileen Donoghue has essentially the same approach. James Miceli has the extreme Bush Dog point of view: let's see what General BetrayUs has to say. Front-runner Niki Tsongas, the one with the name recognition because of her former husband, the senator, also seems to be running with the Bush Dog crowd, as does Barry Finegold. If you'd like to express an interest in ending Bush's Iraq agenda, you can consider donating to Jamie's campaign.

It's official: People in gov't who write honest reports not only expect their drafts to be falsified by regime loyalists but are trying to fight it

You've probably heard about the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the results of the Iraq surge, which was requested by Congress and will be delivered in final form Tuesday. Today's Washington Post carried a report ("Report Finds Little Progress on Iraq Goals") on a "strikingly negative GAO draft" that was leaked to the paper.

This is not to be confused, of course, with the pack o' lies 'n' spin--er, report--that the White House will be serving up the second week in September. That will be the official response to the "just wait till September" line of bull the Bush regime has been feeding us all summer. Congress has taken the precaution of commissioning more reliably objective reports: this one from the GAO and an evaluation of Iraqi security forces from an independent commission headed by retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones.

Lane Hudson was struck, in a News from the Left post, by a curious detail in the Post report caught, detailing how the paper got hold of the draft: "The person who provided the draft report to The Post said it was being conveyed from a government official who feared that its pessimistic conclusions would be watered down in the final version -- as some officials have said happened with security judgments in this month's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq."

I think by now all DWT readers are familiar with this drill as practiced by Bush regime loyalists. The very definition of a "draft report" in this regime is a report that hasn't been "fixed" yet. I think it's safe to say that there's no such thing as a report that a really loyal Bush loyalist can't "fix," especially if he/she is blessed with total ignorance of the facts. (This comes in really handy when it's time to rewrite reports that were once science-based--before the regime hoodlum took his/her ax and crayon to it.)

Now, Lane notes, we have an indication that government insiders are coming to grips with, and looking for ways around, this reality:

Interesting, huh? Government officials are now leaking reports because they fear the White House or the Pentagon will change them so much that they will no longer accurately reflect the truth. It's pathetic that I'm not surprised one tiny little bit. That's how far gone my trust in the Administration is. It's also all the more reason why Congress needs to stand up and put an end to this charade and stop the War.