Friday, May 16, 2008

More Contracting (Collins Version 3.0)

As chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, Sen. Collins was better positioned than anyone else in government to investigate--and help reform--our dangerous, corrupt and expensive war procurement practices. But for years she did nothing.

In January, the junior senator defended her inaction by claiming that she didn't want to duplicate work being done elsewhere.

Then in February the story changed--a spokesman argued that pleas for oversight dating back to 2003 were a sham, a partisan effort by a single committee Democrat to score political points.

Since that's been disproved, Collins seems to have moved on to a third set of justifications: Hearings themselves are nothing more than political theatre. And, by the way, she's shocked and appalled to be criticized about something so serious.

Two responses.

First, if hearings are as useless as Collins makes them sounds, why did she hold so many of them during her tenure as committee chair? Was it all about scoring political points and political theatre?

Second, on the junior senator's shock and dismay: No one responsible for this kind of garbage is in the position to play the "appalled" card. Please.

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