01695: Senate Comedy

So the Senate Hearings are on-going right about now and Janet Napoles, alleged mastermind of the multi-billion Peso pork barrel scam, is present for questioning. I won't even bother getting into the details of her non-testimony so far - this is a Senate Hearing in aid of legislation after all and this is not a criminal proceeding. Getting her to confess to anything right now is irrelevant since it's not like this is evidence that can be introduced in her actual plunder trial. Nor is she even obligated to defend herself in anyway - she just has to answer questions as "honestly" as she can. And given she has no true incentive to be honest in any way, this is just another ring in our circus.

Unfortunately the wheels of criminal justice are horribly slow in this country. We'll be lucky if her plunder trial even gets to start before 2013 ends. And it will take a good amount of time before we make any headway there given how much evidence needs to be presented by the prosecution and of course the defense will find every possible loophole to squirrel out of addressing any of the direct accusations. It's going to be crazy, crazy, crazy.

I swear to doge, blue ribbon committees are some of the biggest ways that the Senate wastes both time and taxpayer money. We mask all these hearings under the need to aid legislation, and then what? How many laws have we seen come out of these committee hearings? Did the ZTE hearings result in radical changes to how we negotiate government contracts? Did the hearings about those sex tapes result in new laws to combat, um, sextaping? What good are these meetings other than creating a media frenzy and presenting politicians with a great opportunity to show off to potential voters that they seem to know what they're doing? Heck, it's not like that even happens all the time either given some of the really pointless questions out there.

This is one of the reasons why we  never get anything done. Instead of focusing on the real issues and instead of politicians doing their actual jobs, we get this telenovela crap.