The hearings were really a great success as theater of the absurd. The inconvenient facts -- that Libya and Syria serial regime change was a colossal CIA failure --can't be made to altogether "disappear", but the event can be made to seem so absurd that no "serious person" in Washington wants to pick into the topic any further. That's the purpose of these bipartisan spectacles. Clinton, who is the leading neocon in America, is now cleansed, thanks to the "opposition" Republicans.

It's a formula, or a ritual, really. The ghosts of the Clintons' (and the Bush family's) role in BCCI/Iran-Contra were also exorcised by the Republicans botched Whitewater investigation. Mismanaged Congressional hearings, sabotaged from above, also managed to whitewash the Bush CIA's role in arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq War and in creating terrorist Rightwing death squads in Central America, with the help of Rightwing Democrats, such as the Clintons. The theater of the absurd is how both wings of the spooks stay in power permanently in America.

We have the biggest ship, and you still have the lead, damnit, increase the throttles. Full power! Give the passengers a real thrill . . . what was that noise? Oooops.