Chris Shays doesn't do oversight, but his 2008 challenger, Jim Himes, apparently does.
Today the Himes campaign debuted a website, APerfectJob.info, that documents Chris Shays' dereliction of duty on the House Oversight Committee:
Chris Shays serves on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But instead of using his position to actually conduct oversight of private security contractors in Iraq and ask the tough questions that his job demands, he has been using it to relentlessly defend the Bush Administration and effusively praise witnesses like the CEO of Blackwater USA:
The site gets its name, "A Perfect Job," from the phrase Shays used to describe Blackwater USA during an Oversight hearing in October. The committee was investigating the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater guards. This was a time when everyone, including Shays' own constituents, was screaming for proper oversight.
We advocate -- no, insist -- on stronger congressional oversight of all outside contractors in Iraq and other war zones. ... If Blackwater USA security guards fired without provocation, they should be tried.
The State Department's actions speak louder than its statement claiming continuing faith in Blackwater USA, whose guards last month allegedly fired indiscriminately on people in a square in Baghdad.
But instead of investigating Blackwater, Shays used his time at the hearing to praise Blackwater CEO Erik Prince for doing "A Perfect Job."
Watch the video:
Shays' Blackwater performance was only his most glaring example of undermining Congressional hearings. Other examples include the investigation of Lurita Doan and the Government Services Administration.
Doan had turned the GSA into a political favor machine doling out government services to Republicans in need of good press at election time - in an apparent violation of the Hatch Act. Shays himself was the beneficiary of GSA favors, but the obvious conflict of interest didn't stop Shays from acting as Doan's personal cheerleader.
Watch the video:
At another hearing, looking into the mysterious friendly fire death of American war hero Pat Tillman, Shays laid off any serious questions of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and merely thanked Rumsfeld for just "showing up."
At a hearing looking into the deaths of Blackwater contractors killed in Falluha, Shays didn't grill Blackwater executives. He ripped into the widows of the contractors.
Over the last several years, by failing to conduct any meaningful oversight of the Bush Administration, Shays has slipped into the role of a Bush lap dog.
Jim Himes, by holding Shays accountable, has become the new watch dog.
Shays made an appearance in front of a group of Greenwich seniors and, despite the Stamford Advocate's and Greenwich Time's see-no-evil coverage of his Hatch Act violations cover-up, Shays still complained about the "biased media."
Neither the Greenwich Time nor Stamford Advocate have covered the story surrounding Lurita Doan and Shays' cover-up of Doan's and Karl Rove's Hatch Act violations. Heck, they even turned down letters to the editor about such stuff (h/t Ann Galloway) ... so it makes me wonder who the media is biased against?
According to Shays, here are the issues that the media should be covering:
Along with global warming and road kill by drunken drivers - inconvenient truths - Shays declared issues needing to be continually explored and reported on in depth by the media include over-population, illegal immigrants and Islamic terrorists.
Never mind the Iraq War, health care, affordable housing, illegal wiretaps, traffic on I-95, or violations of the Hatch Act covered up by Chris Shays.
Oh yeah, and the biased media -- we need to do something about that too.
With the revelation in today's Washington Post that Chris Shays was one of the main beneficiaries of Karl Rove's "Asset Deployment" strategy of sending senior Administration officials around the country to bolster the chances of politically vulnerable Republicans, it's worth revisiting Shays' performance during the testimony of GSA Administrator Lurita Doan in June's House Government Oversight Committee hearings:
Here are just a few of the cloying rhetorical defenses of Doan provided by Shays during the hearing:
Ms. Doan, I think you're a remarkable person. I think you're a beautiful person. I regret that you've been treated the way that you've been treated....
...And I don't care what the press thinks about what I'm going to say or anybody else. I just want to say to you, you are a remarkable person. And you have been attacked and attacked and attacked. And you have held your head up high....
...There has got to be a point where this hearing is ending, and if anything, owe her an apology for what you put her through....
...You know what? I just want to thank you for your service. I hope it doesn't discourage other people like you to get into this. And I will say this to you, I find it -- and this is my own view -- but I find it when an African-American happens to be a Republican, somehow she is treated differently by Congress, and unfairly so....
Doan was, of course, in front of the committee to defend her violation of the Hatch Act for, in part, using federal government resources to act on the political directives of Karl Rove and help out a list of endangered GOP incumbents in battleground districts.
Now we find out that in the last six months of the campaign last year, also through the manipulations of Rove, Shays received seven visits from Administration officials for "official" purposes as flimsy and ridiculous as presenting a Norwalk school with a $23 weather radio. (Photo of actual radio below.)
Meanwhile, guess who happened to be on Rove's list of endangered Republicans?
No wonder Shays thought Doan was a "remarkable person" who was owed an "apology" for being "unfairly treated" by Democrats in the committee based on her race.
What drama! What passion! And what a coincidence that Shays should be one of Lurita Doan's most dogged defenders!
Virtually the entirety of the federal government becomes co-opted as an arm of the Republican political machine, and gosh if it isn't aimed at reelecting the people best positioned to muddy the waters of an investigation into just such a violation of law. Glory be!
Lurita Doan, administrator of the General Services Administration, testified in front of Rep. Waxman's oversight committee in the House this past Wednesday.
Despite the fact that the White House's own investigator has called on her to be fired for her violation of the Hatch Act (specifically, trying to use her office to help GOP Senate candidates), and despite her conveniently horrible memory in a hearing earlier this spring, the decreasingly sane Chris Shays insisted on claiming she was being treated unfairly by the committee, not because she clearly violated the law, or because she refused to testify forthrightly... but because of her race:
SHAYS: Ms. Doan, I think you're a remarkable person. I think you're a beautiful person. I regret that you've been treated the way that you've been treated....
...You know what? I just want to thank you for your service. I hope it doesn't discourage other people like you to get into this. And I will say this to you, I find it -- and this is my own view -- but I find it when an African-American happens to be a Republican, somehow she is treated differently by Congress, and unfairly so.
He even quoted Thurgood Marshall in defense of Doan:
They talk about it being an interrogation. We had, last week, a Democratic member say, I have a lot of questioning, but I have to say that, after being here for 11 years, I hate it when witnesses are attacked. It bothers me, particularly when they are trying to do the best they can, in the words of Thurgood Marshall, "with what they have."
Full transcript of Shays' comments during the hearing below the fold.
Update: Full video of hearing at C-SPAN (.rm file), Shays' comments start at apx. 2:58:55 - H/T mikect.
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