The Frist-Hastert stunt goes awry — Day Three

November 10, 2005

So much for the Republican leadership’s clever ideas. To briefly recap, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced Tuesday that they wanted a formal congressional investigation into the leak to the Washington Post about “black sites,” the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. The idea, apparently, was to put Dems on the defensive and show GOP leaders taking leaks of classified information seriously.

Since then, it’s been one embarrassment after another. Trent Lott said the leak may have come from a Republican senator; the left seemed to love the Frist/Hastert idea, and Republican lawmakers said they can’t understand why the party leaders want hearings on the leak over secret CIA prisons but not the prisons themselves.

It gets worse. Now, the House Intelligence Committee is unhappy with the Frist/Hastert stunt, saying the leaders’ request for a leak investigation is contradicting the committee’s work. Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman has said he’s ignoring the Frist/Hastert request.

And The Hill reports the entire stunt was a mess from the beginning.

A leak suspected to have come from the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) complicated, confused and nearly derailed a joint effort by Senate and House Republican leaders to seek an investigation of the unauthorized release of classified information. […]

The request for the investigation was intended to give Republicans political momentum on the issue of national security at a time when Democrats have recently scored public-relations victories on national security. Instead, the premature release of Frist and Hastert’s letter set off a chain of events that drew attention to what some House Republicans call the inability of the Senate to coordinate with them.

In their wildest dreams, Dems couldn’t have asked for such incompetent rivals.

In their wildest dreams, Dems couldn’t have asked for such incompetent rivals.

Except for, you know, they’re in charge of the House, Senate for at least the next year and the Presidency for the next three. Let’s hope the incompetence translates into election losses.

  • It gets better. Trent Lott is now backpedaling. See he was really commenting on a Post story about Cheney’s torture fetish, not the secret Eastern European prison system we now have.

    http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_11_06_atrios_archive.html#113163291630484248

    So Lott is in hot water for initially telling the truth. Pat Roberts refuses to investigate any national security leak implicating a Republican. Frist’s office prematurely pulled the trigger.Frist was leaving Denny Hastert to twist in the wind. And the House is ticked because it never wanted to investigate any specific leaks but just sniff around generally.

    I’m stunned. Indict or threaten to indict one or two party leaders and the whole pack turns on each other.

  • Maybe it’s time to start questioning the intelligence of Frist’s staff as well as the moron himself. There have been a lot of incompetent politicians in both parties who have managed to get by with skillful managing from their aides and assistants. The fact that Frist keeps stumbling from one disaster to another might indicate that either the aides are as incompetent as their boss, or he is just not listening to them and following his own instincts….right over the proverbial cliff.

    Either way, it’s an interesting sidebar to the continuing clown show that is the Republican Party.

  • I think we can now make it official: Bill Frist is the most incompetent Congressional leader of our time. Is there anything this guy touches that does not turn into a disaster? From Schiavo to stem cells to the nuclear option to his “Wah, Mommy, that’s not fair!” tirade over Reid’s stunt last week, he continues to make an absolute fool of himself. And this guy seriously thinks he’s presidential material? He makes Bush look like a fricking genius (perhaps because Frist has no Karl Rove to hold his hand).

    I agree, we couldn’t ask for a better opponent. Good thing for him he’s quitting the Senate after next year, because at this rate he won’t be Majority Leader after next fall anyway.

  • I was not comfortable with the idea of removing Senator Trent Lott from his position as Senate Majority Leader over some offhand remarks at a birthday party. I may not have liked Strom Thrumond but he was elected time and time again even after he ran for president on a segragationist platform. The Democrats have Robert Byrd, after all. Both men brought a lot of money into their relatively poor states and in that regard, were good representatives of their constituents.

    I vote Democratic, knowing my state, New York, loses money because I have Democrats has my representatives.

    What bothered me about the Trent Lott affair was that the White House called the shot.

    After a few months, I really missed old Helmet Head on Sunday morning. At least Trent Lott told you where he and the other Senate Republicans stood and Senator Lott did not always agree with the White House. There is a lot to be said for having experienced political leaders at the helm. Trent Lott knows the rules and he knows how to make deals.

    The other day, I read a story by Elisabeth Busmiller about the president’s attendance at the summit in Argentina. What was the White House and the State Department thinking by letting Bush walk into such a p.r. disaster? Everyone in the world knows that Bush goes to bed at 9:30 at night and is not used to staying up late.

    I’m sure that the leaders of other American countries deliberately let the meetings run over the next day so Bush would have to skip lunch. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez pulled a similar stunt at the Monterrey Conference a couple of years ago.

    Castro and Chavez knew that Bush would not go to the Monterrey conference in Mexico as long as Castro was there. Castro and Chavez deliberately had a long lunch so as to keep Bush waiting in El Paso.

    After, Castro went on Cuban TV and told a 2-hour story about how he telephoned Vincente Fox, the conference sponsor, and told him that he wanted goat at the conference. For some reason, Fox did not serve goat so Castro went and had rice and beans with Hugo Chavez.

    Laugh if you will but some of these people take their meals seriously. I think it was an Egyptian general who was insulted when Ariel Sharon only served him two sausages for a meal.

    In another blog, I commented that if I were a leader of an American country, I would not risk my country’s wellbeing just so I could insult the president of the United States.

    The United States is in the middle of a terrible war and this is not the time to have inexperienced people running the country. The State Department should have headed off that Argentinian disaster. If I could anticipate a problem, so could the State Department.

    Senator Frist simply did not have enough experience to run the Senate and Senator Lott knew it. What is it about the chickens coming home to roost?

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