Remember when Harry Reid was Minority Leader and he used some procedural move to shut-down the Senate until the Republicans would agree to move forward with Phase II investigation over pre-war intelligence? How’s that Phase II investigation going now that Harry Reid controls the Senate?

Still, another Intelligence panel Democrat, Dianne Feinstein of California, said the status of the Phase II investigation was a “good question.” Feinstein said she has not “been at a meeting where it’s come up. But I can’t make every meeting.”

[Intelligence Chairman Jay] Rockefeller said last week that the investigation is “chugging along very nicely,” but quietly, “without pyrotechnics,” a reference to the fights of recent years.

Not so, said Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the top Republican on the Intelligence panel. “They haven’t scheduled any time on it,” he said.

“I don’t think they’re that hot on it,” Bond said, charging that Democratic complaints from recent years amounted to “games.” Now, he said, “I want to get it done and over with.”

The Phase II investigation is supposed to focus on two things: “examining the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and…contrasting the statements of public officials with what the intelligence community was saying at the time.”

The Democrats’ excuse is that they are working on more pressing matters, like the FISA bill…which they passed out of committee last week with retroactive immunity for the telecommunications corporations.

The FISA bill is important, but not nearly as important as holding the criminals that got us into this catastrophic war accountable. The Dems are more concerned with covering the ass of the Establishment than they are with getting us out of this war.

Committee spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said work on Phase II has been “ongoing,” and it is still on the agenda.

“Over the next few months, the committee will work towards completion of the final, remaining two reports,” Morigi said. “Sen. Rockefeller is absolutely committed to finishing Phase II so that the American public have a full accounting of how intelligence was used to justify the war.”

I call bullshit. Where is the urgency? You call this ‘absolute committment’? I call it a total whitewash. At this point we should be moving onto Phase III: How the Intelligence Community is using psychological operations to maintain support for a failed war. And Phase IV: How the intelligence is being fixed around the policy of obliterating Iran.

We’ve seen this before…it was called Iran-Contra, and it was far less serious that what we are facing now. I saw Fred Thompson, on a post-debate show last night, tell Alan Colmes that Iran is trying to take over the entire Middle East and that we are therefore justified in spending hundreds of billions on discretionary defense spending. He told Colmes ‘to read something’ and then he might understand that our budget problems are all about entitlements and have nothing to do with preventing the 1000-year Persian empire.

The Republicans are out there in some alternate reality…a reality that has no connection to reality. Their ideology is dangerous. And the Democrats are covering their ass.

This has to stop.