Reply #208: The New Republic: Bush Compares Congressional Hearings To Soviet Show Trials

[L. Coyote]

Oversight Is Torture For Bush
The New Republic: Bush Compares Congressional Hearings To Soviet Show Trials
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/16/opinion/main2687034.shtml

Save perhaps, for his mustache, there's nothing about Henry Waxman that would lead anyone to mistake him for Joseph Stalin. Stalin's rise to general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party included stints as a Bolshevik bank robber and a commissar in the Red Army; Waxman was elected to Congress after representing an affluent West Los Angeles district in the California State Assembly......

..... to hear Republicans tell it, Waxman might as well be nicknamed Henry the Dread. The reason for the Stalin analogies is that Democratic committee chairs have authorized subpoenas for top White House and Justice Department officials to testify at hearings about the U.S. attorney purge and other myriad Bush administration scandals — hearings that President Bush himself has disparaged as "show trials."

Now, it's possible that Bush slept through his Soviet history lessons, but show trials, of course, are not really trials at all — their verdicts having been predetermined with the defendants' "confessions" extracted through torture. Contrast that with what Democrats hope to achieve by subpoenaing administration officials. Democrats don't know whether Karl Rove had a hand in the firings of U.S. attorneys, although there's enough circumstantial evidence to suspect that he did. The fact that Democrats want him to testify about the matter in public — as opposed to being "interviewed" behind closed doors, not under oath, and with no transcript, as the Bush administration has offered — does not mean that Democrats want to conduct a show trial. Far from it. They simply want to know what Rove did or did not do ..........