Oh, Come ON!

WASHINGTON, May 23 — The Senate Intelligence Committee strongly endorsed Gen. Michael V. Hayden on Tuesday to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, with all but three members, all Democrats, voting to send General Hayden's nomination to the Senate floor.

The panel's 12-to-3 vote virtually guarantees that General Hayden will win confirmation by the full Senate, which is likely to vote on his selection before the end of the week. ...

Four committee Democrats joined all eight Republican members in endorsing the general.

What is it going to take? This administration has spit in the face of Congressional authority again and again, it deliberately chose the man behind the most controversial government intrusion into our lives in decades, and the Democrats can't even get a majority of their members on the committee to vote against it? In the blog idiom, "WTF?!!"

I don't care if Michael Hayden is a whiz at intelligence work, if he's a really nice guy to talk to, or if he's promised to bring Kappas back to undo some of Goss' blundering. It's long past time for saying 'enough is enough.' A vote against Hayden would have been a message that the Democrats in the Senate were tired of being treated with contempt and disrespect by a President who would be King.

It's not even like voting against him would have changed the outcome. The Republicans have the majority on the committee and the full Senate. If, after all that has happened, those four Democrats couldn't even cast a symbolic vote against Hayden, why are they even there? It's not like their friends in the intelligence and military community wouldn't understand them making a vote out of respect to the (D- ) after their name, knowing it wouldn't stop Hayden from getting the job.

Clearly, on a practical, political level, there is no Democratic party. Parties exert power not merely through numerical majority, but by controlling party discipline. Vote with "the party line" and good comes of it, vote against and woe unto you. The Democrats don't have anyone even attempting to enforce a party line. Hell, they don't even have a "party line."

You'd think that, by now, after Guantanamo, WMD-scam, Abu Ghraib, all-time-low polling numbers and multiple eavesdropping scandals involving this very nominee, they could have at least agreed on "Whenever possible, we will at least make small symbolic gestures in unison to suggest that, perhaps, once in a while, the administration has over-reached in its interpretation of its Constitutional authority." But no. They can't even get a majority of the party's votes in committee.

With behavior like this, getting Congress back in November won't be enough to save the country.