How Blackwater and SCHIP fit together

Blackwater may soon rise to equal standing with SCHIP as major details in the collapse of the Republicans in the White House and Congress. You heard it here first.

Two developments hit my brain especially hard today. One was President Bush’s veto of the SCHIP legislation, the other was a pair of stunning revelations about Blackwater (in addition, of course, to their atrocities):

• The chief operating officer of Blackwater is the former Pentagon inspector-general, Joseph Schmitz, who retired from military service under fire for stonewalling investigations of malfeasance.
• Blackwater helped a convicted Iraqi-American to escape from an Iraqi prison where he was to serve time for corruption. Now the guy’s most likely in Chicago, pining for another appearance in the Oval Office with W (the pardoner).
  

This sort of activity can only flourish in an administration that is corrupt and secretive. Add arrogant to that -- what other than arrogance could make them think these dots wouldn’t be connected?

And thank goodness that we have DailyKos to connect the dots, to remember the stuff that was in the media a year or two ago, to fire up the search engines and to have accumulated hundreds of thousands of daily readers -- critical mass.

So after we do our demos tomorrow against the veto of SCHIP, let us plan how to get Blackwater off our public payroll. It would pay for SCHIP.

Footnotes:

• This link to the Salon story on Schmitz and other Blackwater figures. Note that Cofer Black, infamous for pre-war CIA incompetence, is among them. And there's our old pal Ken Starr, too.
• The jail escape saga.
• SCHIP veto is all over the news. Please note that the president and a lot of Republicans in Congress are going against the opinion of 72 percent of the voting public.