When Forgetting Isn't Enough

This deal with Republican appointees openly talking about using the GSA to aid the Republican Party is a pretty big deal.  If you haven’t already and have the time, I highly recommend that you watch the clip of the GSA’s Lurita Doan getting questioned by Congressmen Braley.  Funny stuff.

The worst part is that Doan clearly doesn’t even understand what she’s supposed to be doing there.  It’s obvious that she’s toast and so it’s not enough that she can’t recall things that she probably does recall.  Hell, it’s bad enough that she’d have gone to this luncheon, listened to a corrupt PowerPoint presentation, spoken after the presentation, and not remembered it or said anything about it.  There’s no way that the head of the GSA hasn’t heard that such stuff is a big no-no, so it’s quite shameful that she’d have even been there and not done something about it.

But in either case, the presentation spoke for itself and it doesn’t matter at all whether she remembers it or not.  No, she needed to go forth and make a case.  She needed to give some spin.  And she failed miserably.  This wasn’t a court of law.  This was Congress.  In a courtroom, there’s a legal standard of proof that a prosecutor must provide; though I suspect that this might easily pass the reasonable doubt test.  

But in the real world, the evidence convicted her before she even spoke.  So not recalling isn’t enough.  She needed a defense.  Or at a minimum, an offense that distracted from her lack of defense.  Perhaps a pointed, yet restrained tirade that would have enraged Braley enough to make him look like a wild prosecutor on a witchhunt.  But no.  He stayed on the offense the whole time and she offered no defense at all.  So instead of him looking like a partisan hack, she looks stupid and corrupt.  But again, isn’t that the trademark of the Bush Administration?