Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Strange Bedfellows

Livingston County has been abuzz with the "news" of Mike Rogers' divorce... well, at least the Press & Argus has been abuzz, with 2 consecutive front-page articles yesterday and today. Sad for his family, not a surprise to most folks, not really above the fold material.

I came across some non-divorce coverage of Rogers today, which had a different take on his recent earmark spat with John Murtha (D-PA). You will recall that Rogers, with full Boy-Scouty indignation, was shocked, shocked to find Murtha upset about Rogers' attack on funding a drug intelligence center in Murtha's district.

[Hmmm. Guess Mr. Rogers (a/k/a Mr. Deputy Whip) wasn't ever in the room when Tom "The Hammer" DeLay was earning his nickname]

The MSM has spent a lot of time praising Rogers' "courageous" stand, and painting Murtha as a vindictive greedhead. No one has spent much time looking at the bigger picture, until this article in Executive Intelligence Review. It discusses why the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) was established and what it does.

The claims that NDIC is redundant within the group of anti-drug agencies (the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, to name just a few), and that intelligence can be gathered by the El Paso (Texas) Intelligence Center, are false. The NDIC was created in 1993, explictly to remedy the problem that the activities of all the organizations involved in anti-drug activity lacked overall intelligence-sharing and coordination. That is the mission of the NDIC. The El Paso center, established in 1974—almost two decades before NDIC—has never done this job; its intelligence function is operational, as befits the entity manning a front-line drug entry point into the United States.


Why did the White House decided to shut down NDIC less than a year after praising its efforts in 2006? This article connects the dots between Murtha's untiring -- and highly credible -- opposition to the war, and a White House that views dissent in the same way as the Corleone Family.

With his attack on Mr. Murtha, Mr. Rogers has shown that he once again is happy to attack on behalf of the Bush administration, facts be damned.

No comments: