The Bush administration has been in office for almost seven years. In that time, they've lied or hidden the truth about the energy task force, the warnings they had about terrorist attacks in 2001, Iraqi WMDs and ties to al Qaeda, the cost of the war in Iraq, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, civilian casualties in Iraq, the death of Pat Tillman, torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, the response to Hurricane Katrina, progress in the Iraq war, the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity, the political motivations behind the firings of US Attorneys, and that's just a list off the top of my head. That's not a record that inspires a lot of trust from me.
So it kind of pissed me off this afternoon at a Town Hall on Iraq when I approached one of my senators after the question and answer session and asked him if he trusted this administration and he told me that he believed in the Reagan doctrine of "Trust but Verify" and told me that he was my guy in Washington to handle the verification.
Let me preface this by saying that Ron Wyden (D-OR) has voted on what I would consider the right side of most issues since the beginning of the Iraq war. He was one of the 21 Democratic senators voting against the AUMF. He was in the small group of senators who voted against the Iraq supplemental this spring. As a recent article in The New Yorker mentions, he probably killed the confirmation of acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo over his involvement in developing policies governing interrogation at the Agency (although Rizzo presumably remains as acting counsel).
But enough is enough. The Bush administration does not deserve the trust of anyone, most particularly Democratic senators. Everything they have done since taking office has been tainted with deceit and disregard for the betterment of the United States. They have broken the trust of Americans so many times in the past seventy-nine months that only a fool would continue to trust them.
There's a more immediate response that I wrote after the Town Hall here.