The End Approaches

Tomorrow is the last day of my internship. Hard to believe, but true. My family is coming out tomorrow, and we're going to have our vacation out in DC. I'll miss the office and the friends I made here, but I'm ready to get on with the summer, too.

As I write this, I have been awake for eighteen hours, since 4 AM. Even so, I'm not tired. In fact, I'm a little giddy. And the reason is, I woke up at 4 AM this morning to go running with Senator Grassley.

No lie. The senator runs three miles every morning at 5:15. (He's 74). Abhay asked him if he could come along, and eventually Adam (from Cherokee) and Tom (from England) got in on the deal. After Grassley wrapped up his live call-in cable show last night, one of his staffers asked me I wanted to go too. Heck yes!

So we got up super-early, took a taxi to his house in Arlington, and went running. It was a beautiful morning (but a really, really hot and humid day), and he led the way. Tom tried to get some action shots of us running, but I'm not sure how they turned out. I'll post them here when he gets them done. Afterwards, Mrs. Grassley made us oatmeal, and the six of us ate breakfast together. If we didn't know who he was, you never would have guessed he was a U.S. Senator. He is just a, friendly, regular guy. Whom I hero-worship just a little.

So where did I leave off last time? Oh yeah, the McClellan hearing.

We went fifty minutes early to try to get into the hearing, but that wasn't early enough, and we got put in an overflow room to watch the hearing on a big TV screen. And if you didn't follow the news reports about the hearing, it didn't amount to much.

The highlight? Rep. Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the committee, gave an opening statement about why he thought the topic was important. Rep. Smith, the ranking Republican, gave an opening statement about why he thought the topic was unimportant. He started off by saying, "Welcome, everyone, to the Judiciary Committee's first Book of the Month Club meeting.
Today, it's Scott McClellan's "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." I propose that next time we consider Ann Coulter's book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)." Smith proceeded to rip into McClellan's credibility and question his motives.

After he finished his statement, McClellan's lawyer stood up - to object! Like it was a courtroom! It took about thirty seconds for the committee members to figure out what the moron was doing. At last, Conyers said, "Counsel cannot object to the committee proceedings." Duh.

Following that, the hearing basically consisted of question-and-answer exchanges like these:

CONYERS: You spoke very frequently with the president and the vice president. Do you think either or both of them knew about the leak and had any role in causing the leak to happen, or knew that Mr. Libby was involved in the leak when they helped get you to falsely vouch for him?

MCCLELLAN: I do not think the president in any way had knowledge about it, based on my conversations with him back at that time, when he said that Karl Rove had not been involved in it and told him something to that effect. In terms of the vice president, I do not know.

SMITH: You write that you witnessed Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby meet in Mr. Rove's office behind closed doors, and you infer that they were conspiring to mislead the grand jury looking to the Valerie Plame investigation at the time. Did you hear any portion of their conversation?
MCCLELLAN: No, sir, I did not.

NADLER: Do you have any knowledge of whether prior to or after the leak of Ms. Wilson's covert identity either the vice president or the president declassified her covert status in order to have it leaked to reporters?
MCCLELLAN: No, I do not.

NADLER: And do you have any information on the role, if any, played by the vice president in the leaking of Ms. Wilson's identity?
MCCLELLAN: No. I have no direct knowledge of that.

NADLER: And do you have any idea why Vice President Cheney may have knowingly, indirectly or directly, instructed you to publicly exonerate Mr. Libby?
MCCLELLAN: No, sir, I do not. I was not a party to that conversation with the president.

NADLER: Do you have any idea whether when he gave that instruction that he knew at that time that Mr. Libby had, in fact, been involved in the leak?
MCCLELLAN: No, I do not know that.

He doesn't know much. I think it slowly dawned on everyone on the committee that this guy was the press secretary, the mouthpiece. Eventually, they had to go vote on something, and we weren't about to wait two hours for them to reconvene, so we went back to work.

On Saturday, Tom and I went to the Holocaust Museum. It was stunning, and really, really depressing. At the beginning, they shove us all into this really gloomy elevator and take us to the third story, and you hear the recorded voice of an American soldier talking about how they had never seen anything like this. Then the elevator doors opened, and they had a bunch of TV screens showing the original footage of the camps the Allies took when they were liberated. It was really horrifying.

The rest of the museum takes you on a journey through Hitler's rise to power, the gradual crackdown on the Jews, the start of the war, and finally, the camps. They have replicas of the barracks and trains, and a huge room full of the actual shoes of the victims. I felt kind of numb to it all, but it was worth it.

The museum has a memorial room that you can look into, but not go into. It had some candles burning, and it was decorated with verses from the Old Testament, the ones about teaching your children to remember.

I would have taken pictures in the museum, but it wasn't allowed. Here's the outside, though:

This is a street nearby the musem. Raoul Wallenberg was a diplomat in Hungary who helped save thousands of Jews. He disappeared after the Soviets took over.



On Monday, we helped some of Grassley's staff put on a relief fundraiser for the Iowa floods. It was held on the roof of a really nice ten-story office building on Constitution Ave. From the top, we had a great view of the Capitol and some other places. (Katie and Abhay took those pictures, still waiting for them.)

Here's the really rich part: we got rained out.

So everyone crowded into the ground floor lobby, and the building staff were all freaking out about all the people, and it was really chaotic for a while. But eventually, we got to go back onto the roof. All of the congressmen from Iowa except Boswell came. So did the Secretary of Agriculture, Ed Schafer, whose hand I shook before knowing who it was. So it was a pretty good time.

Tonight after work, Abhay and I went to the Middle East Institute to hear Richard Clarke speak. (Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush until 2004ish, when he resigned and became one of Bush's biggest critics.) The speech was held in the sweltering heat in a garden at the institute. Hot, but not very many people; we were really close to him. Both Abhay and I asked questions, and I got the whole thing on my flip video camera. (Though I haven't watched it yet and can't guarantee the quality.) We thought that was pretty cool.

When I asked my question, I told him my name and said that I was an intern with Senator Grassley. He said, "Give my regards to Senator Grassley. I have a lot of respect for him."

Darn straight you do.

Anyway, when he answered the first question, he mentioned that the next president needs to, quote, "get us the hell out of Iraq." My question was, what's the best way to do that? He said, remove one brigade every month until you're completely out. I'm more than a little skeptical that that would be in the best interests of either us or the Iraqis, but it was still cool that I got to talk to him.




Also: NBC's Washington studios are on the street our shuttle bus takes to the Metro every day. The sign for the studios had been turned into an impromptu memorial for Tim Russert. I took these while walking there last weekend.

Thanks for reading everybody. I really appreciate you all keeping in touch. Can't wait to see you all again!